


Neurotriptyline

by Ninjaninaiii



Category: In the Flesh (TV), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Depression, Fluff, Gen, Graphic descriptions of suicide, M/M, Slow Build, Suicide, event date adjustments to fit with timeline, eventually, graphic descriptions of death, herms is kieren ish, major character death but then remember there are zombies so they come back, newt is kinda simon, or at least uh most of them do, stacker is the maxine, tendon is amy, transgender character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 07:25:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3348638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ninjaninaiii/pseuds/Ninjaninaiii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dead rise from their graves in the spring of 2020, and suddenly living pilots become a horrific idea. With hundreds of thousands of casualties already, why send those who can still feel, when reanimated corpses can fall on the battlefield instead? (Can be read without having watched In the Flesh)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 2019

**Author's Note:**

> This is an In the Flesh crossover, but should be pretty much completely understandable, even if you haven’t watched the series (which you should do anyway???). 
> 
> It was inspired by tumblr user 2500-tons-0f-awesome’s photo edits and AU ideas, [http://2500-tons-0f-awesome.tumblr.com/post/106665736090/] and developed by quierenwalker’s headcanoning. 
> 
> This fic mostly sticks with the Pacific Rim canon timeline, but ocassional events have changed for reasons. If you find yourself hopelessly lost, I have a cheat sheet here: (https://docs.google.com/document/d/13y-mBIVq60c6XZwLpK43WViXmGn37V4yNOcLHy8UJpg/edit?usp=sharing) but this contains MAJOR SPOILERS so only click as a last resort!

 

* * *

 

March

Newton Geiszler sits in a hot bath and cries.

 

* * *

 

July

Hermann cannot open his eyes. He cannot bring himself to. He coughs, again and again, a choking cough, one that rips at his lungs and sends violent stabs of pain shooting from his leg, and he curses. He curses everything. He curses the PPDC, he curses the alien race bent on destroying their planet, he curses Newton Geiszler. Because that’s why he is here, because that’s why he is in this country, in this state when he should have been at his chalkboards, in his lab, in Anchorage, or Japan, or Hong Kong.

He’d received an urgent e-mail only days ago, calling for a top-priority meeting on the orders of some higher-up that was higher than any of the other higher-ups Hermann belonged to. Hermann hadn’t wanted to leave his room, let alone the country, to join in on some convoluted argument about the future of his career, about the future of the world. He wasn’t like his father, he wasn’t a leader, he didn’t have time for the ‘yes Sir, no Sir, three bags full, Sir’ that was inevitable. But he had less-than-legally obtained a guest list, to check whether a mortal enemy under the name of Geiszler would be attending, and had found that he wouldn’t, so that, at least, had been favourable.

Hermann had nearly not noticed this particular urgent e-mail, and it is now, as he lies here, he wishes he hadn’t seen it, hadn’t been obliged because of his ridiculous necessity to pander to authority, to go. Six years of Kaiju attack had meant six years of flagged emails, of emails written in caps lock, with subjects like “IMPORTANT INFORMATION”, “CLASSIFIED INFORMATION”, “RE: REDACTING THE USE OF THE TERM APOCALYPSE”, and though the email had its little red arrow, the subject had been vaguely unenchanting. “Meeting to decide new regulations” sounded almost domestic, like an email from the management team of a small office-block.

‘You are required to be present at a compulsory meeting regarding new regulations in light of recent incidents that will be discussed on arrival. The details below are non-negotiable. Travel must be organised on your own account, but hotel throughout your stay and expenses will be provided.

The meeting will be held from 9 AM (PST) on the  22nd of July 2019, (Twenty Second of July, Twenty Nineteen), at the following location: 111 West Harbor Drive, San Diego, CA, United States [+1 619-525-5000]’

Hermann had known it had been note-worthy at the mention of expenses. It meant something rather serious if the already stretched military was willing to divert some of the much-needed finance from artillery and jaegers to flying a collection of scientists to a room when video calls had developed so much. ‘Recent incidents’ also piqued his interests, but finding a guest list was a completely different crime to unveiling a confidential matter, so he hadn’t pried. He could wait and find out what petty matter had brought them all to a stand-still worthy of new regulations.

By nine on the dot, he and his fellows had been sat down at a circular table in a conference room lined with guards. Heavily armed guards, whose faces were hidden behind thick helmets, and who were unidentifiable as police, military or privately owned. Hermann knew many of the faces he was sat with, despised most of them, put up with the rest. They were the heads of science from various international Shatterdomes, and they all looked the same despite their attire varying from old man to rockabilly. Tired, sleepless, itching to get back to their studies, concerned by the heavy protection. Half sat as ramrod straight as Hermann did, hands clasped on the table on top of wads of paper and pre-prepared pens, occasionally adjusting their glasses. The other half mimicked what Hermann had no doubt Newton would do had he been in the situation: they were either slouched forward and practically asleep with their heads resting on their arms on the table, or were reclining back and looking like they wanted to dart for the doors.

The one obvious anomaly to the group was the woman sat in front of the projector screen, and whose eyes had been following them as they’d filed in. She was dark-skinned, heavily built, well-muscled, and an obvious strength exuded from her. She reminded Hermann very much of the Russian pilots he’d met at Vladivostok, but her eyes didn’t glisten with quite so much cheek and energy as theirs had.

She stands and clears her throat. She introduces herself briefly, but Hermann has forgotten what she had said because it is the next bit he pays attention to, the next bit he will probably never be able to clear from his mind. She talks for three minutes before the fire alarm goes off. Everyone startles but Hermann. They wonder if it’s a drill, or, perhaps whether someone had been smoking somewhere they shouldn’t have been. Then they hear it. The first scream. It’s too close for comfort. They look at each other, warily, then at the guards. All heads finally turn towards the woman at the front of the room. She touches a finger to her ear and her eyes shut. She affirms to whoever had talked to her and opens her eyes.

“We are under attack. It is a Category III Kaiju. It has surfaced approximately a mile from our current location. We are to evacuate immediately.”

They are scientists. They are not pilots. They await instructions and fight every urge to scatter. Most of them hadn’t had to run for a long time. Most of them barely walked anywhere but their labs these days. Hermann is in shock. He waits with the rest of them.

A silence decends upon them as a shadow encompases the building. The automatic lights in the room flicker on as the windows are completely blocked out by a grey mass. That’s when people start to run. Hermann watches as some retain their earthquake-survival education and seek out safe spots. Others get funneled into the basement. He realises that this will be his death and he wants to see the sky. Instead of heading down the final staircase with everyone else, he runs through the lobby and goes outside.

He can see where the Kaiju had been- there’s smoke, gods, so much smoke, and the streets are nearly flattened but for the mounds of rubble- he can see the sea from here. He cannot see the Kaiju. He stumbles a couple of steps forwards so that he is out of the cover of the material tenting that shades the doorway. His breathing is irregular and fast and the sky is so blue, it’s so hot without the air conditioning from the building, he can feel his skin saturate with sweat underneath his sweater, the air is acrid, charred buildings, crushed brick, tinged with  a cut of the sea, of something foul, there are no birds, the screams have died out, there is silence-

It creaks. Hermann’s legs falter, his nerves overwhelmed, it’s behind him, it’s behind the building, it’s behind him, a window smashes, then another, he can’t turn around, it’s behind him. He turns, he sees it, it’s massive, it’s so big, it’s so big it dwarfs the couple dozen storey hotel, how can anyone fight these creatures, how can anyone survive them-

When he wakes, the pain is horrendous. His eyes are burning and they’re shut and he can’t bring himself to open them. He can feel the dust clogging them shut, can feel the thick layer of dirt and stone weighing down on his face, his body. His leg is in agony and he tries to move it- he must black out again, because when he wakes the next time, he is covered in his own bile, cannot smell anything but the acid that makes him gag again. He has to open his eyes. He has to clean himself. He has to- He sobs, hysteric. His leg is in so much pain and he can’t move, and he can’t hear anything, and he can’t hear anyone, and he’s alone, and he doesn’t want to be here, he shouldn’t be here, it’s all Newton’s fault-

He rubs at his eyes, furiously, using his own damned tears to clean away the worst of the grit before he brings his sleeve to his mouth, scrubbing away the contents of his stomach, busying himself, busying himself so that he doesn’t think about the cloying, rusting smell of dried blood on sunbaked stone that’s started to permeate his senses- he bites his lip and he’s shaking so much, he’s so cold, what happened to the sun, what happened to the heat-

He blinks his eyes open and it’s so bright. He winces, squinting his eyes and covering them with his hand. The sun is directly above him. He’s been lying here for three hours. His eyes adjust, slowly, the red imprint of the sun fading from his eyes.

It’s a length of reinforcing steel, Hermann realises. It’s a rusted, twisted metal bar, blunt and bent from being ripped from the building.  The impact of the building’s destruction must have flung him through it. The reason he is lying at such an odd angle is because he’s suspended on the block of concrete that the metal that’s ripped through the muscle inches below his hip belongs to. He only has to lift his head slightly to look at it, his legs on the higher end of the block and so in his line of sight. He stares at the wound like he’s dissecting the heart of cow again, like he’s in secondary school, morbidly curious.

He wants to pass out again. The pain gets stronger every time he moves, and the steady stream of blood leaking from it doesn’t look promising. It’s been at least three hours. He wonders if the Kaiju had been killed, or whether it had moved on to another city, or whether it lurked just out of vision, undefeated. Hermann works up the strength to tip his head back, to assess what lies beyond him.

The road, mere meters away from him, is deserted. Abandoned cars, long-since cooled down, wait for owners who may or may not still be alive. He turns his head the other direction. The hotel is practically non-existent.

Hermann had been flung into the hotel’s promenade, the driveway only having been pelted with the stray chunks of building that hadn’t disappeared from out of Hermann’s sight. He doesn’t retain much hope for those who’d found themselves in the basement, let alone anyone else above the first floor. He cannot see another soul, he cannot hear anything but the crackling of a still-strong fire, of the steady tumble of bricks smashing to the ground. The smell of blood is getting stronger and there’s a regular drip of it as it rolls past his head and onto the ground.

Knowing the numbers of the deceased after an attack was his job. He had known many members of the PPDC, friends, family, colleagues, who had been victim.

The hotel he’d been at had had 50 meeting rooms across 30 floors and it had been relatively busy. Assuming an average amount of the 1200 rooms had been vacant, the building alone could have contained a similar number of people. And that was just this building; San Diego’s population, though not boasting the millions it had in 2013, was still around the 800,000 mark. Hermann couldn’t guess at whether the Jaeger had won, or had won fast enough: how could he guess how many people had died when only years ago 3 cities had been obliterated. He might be the only man alive within a hundred mile radius.

He knows it is a cold thought, but he hopes to the gods that at least half of the scientists that had been in the room with him had survived. They were so important. His heart did not want to trivialise the deaths of the businessmen or the military personnel or the civilians who had also perished in the attack, but whose idea had it been to collect the world’s hopes for humanity in one room? Was that not why they had had a surplus of guards in the room? Was that not why the email had been so suspiciously simple? So unsuspecting? So that no BuenaKai extremist could find them out and destroy the forefront of technology before it was created? So that no other extremist, belonging to a wide variety of vaguely-threatening groups could take a scientist hostage and leech the precious little funding there was left in the economy?

Hermann  thinks about the amount of information that has potentially just been lost to the world. Because they had all been in one room.

Because they had been gathered together to discuss one man.

Hermann cannot work up the energy to be as angry as he should be. He fumbles in his trouser pockets for his phone but it’s not there, of course it’s not there, it has probably slipped in the attack, or perhaps he left it in his room for fear it would go off in the meeting, at any rate, he does not have it. This is fine. This doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t. He will be saved.

Hermann has to be saved. He’s alive, isn’t he? He survived a Kaiju crushing a building on top of him. He’s one of the most intelligent people left alive on the planet. He has to live. He has to be saved. It hurts so much, but he cannot let it defeat him. He has to survive so that the rest of humanity does.

He has his headache medication in his pocket.

He could end it, he thinks, he could end it now. It hurts so much. Who can say how long a rescue team would take to reach him. Who can say they would search for the scientists they had doomed? The packet is new, full but for one, he could take them all and end the pain.

He takes out the box, small, blue, it fits in his palm. His hands are shaking so much, he feels so cold, it’s not a good sign, but it hurts so much. He lets his arm relax so he’s holding the box against his forehead, he closes his eyes. He could do it, he could do it.

He lets the box fall behind him.

He will not give in, it hurts, but he cannot let himself die now.

A vibration interrupts his thoughts and his eyes widen. He stretches his arm towards the noise, the tiny, shuddering noise and his fingers clutch at sun-warmed plastic and glass just as the vibrations fade. He wants to kiss the device, he wants to cry, he’s found his phone, surely this must be a sign, a miracle, he clicks it on and his heart plummets.

No signal. No internet. A full battery and no signal. No signal towers. No radio towers. The city has been flattened. The vibration had been an alarm, when to next take the pills for the slowly growing migraine he’d had this morning. He turns on any option he can think of, he turns them all on, redundant or not, any chance at survival, GPS, NFC, bluetooth, anything. His fingers have taken to trembling almost uncontrollably when he’s finished with adjusting his settings. He wants to do more, to modify the device like he knows he can, or could, if he had a screwdriver, his laptop, anything but mounds of rubble and broken glass.

With nothing to do but time to kill, Hermann opens his email app in its offline mode, purely for something to read. He has saved dozens of messages, from important colleagues’ latest theories to important family members’ latest family photos. He likes these ones, the photos of Karla’s children, of Bastien’s family, seeing them relaxing in a way Hermann could never chance to do when he had had so much work to do, and so little time to think about anything but Kaiju and death and-

When he flicks to the next email, it is not a photo from his family. He has not read this message yet, had been saving up to reading it. He had met Newton Geiszler two years ago for the first time in real life, and it had been a mistake. They had not returned to their constant, four year email communication after the trip. That was, until a couple of months ago, when Hermann had received this email from the man, that had no subject name but was, he could see from the amount of bytes it took up, a large message.

Hermann reads the first line, the ‘Hey Herms,’ several hundred times. His eyes burn. The woman’s voice from barely hours ago repeats in his ears. He forces his hands to still.

‘Hey Herms,

Long time no speak, right? Yeah crazy times for all and all that, and what with all the shouting we did, I wasn’t sure you wanted to talk to me ever again, so that’s cool, I got the message (or y’know, didn’t get the message, pretty sure it was your turn to email back, so I kinda left it.) But whatever, that’s fine, I mean I kinda expected it, not many people can tolerate a full-serving of the Newt’s raw power, and by not many I mean no-one, so it’s not like I expected you to be able to or whatever.

Sooo anyway how’s the angry maths going? I bet you’ve got a billion new theories and have found out the next n numbers of pi or whatever which is really rad, keep doing what you’re doing. I read that one you wrote about the dimensions, that was was good (I made some notes though, which are attached and called something like “dimensions pimensions amirite” cos I mean it wouldn’t be me unless I told you how wrong you were in complete detail. I hope you like them and / or understand them I kinda handwrote them and scanned the notes because who even uses computers nowadays anyways psh.

I guess if you’re reading this you might actually have maybe liked me a little bit. Or not, don’t want to be too presumptuous here, I know you hated that when we met. I mean I know i’m cocky but dude i hope you realise how cocky you are in your “oh i’m so british look at me only drinking earl grey when coffee could keep me up for longer” but whatever i’m not  writing this to start shit with you again i’m just rambling because i’m not really too sure how i’m going to tell you what i want to tell you in so few words, y’know? or i guess u don’t know because i haven’t actually typed it yet and we haven’t talked for a couple of years and maybe i misunderstood how much i thought i knew you and how much i thought we were alike.

turns out, herms, i’m not as cocky as you thought i was. turns out i’m not as good as i thought i was. i’ve given up. I’ve given up. I can’t do it. I can’t work out how the Kaiju work. I can’t work out how to kill them. I can’t work out where they come from, whether they’re sentient, whether they’re intelligent creatures. I’m not cut out for it. I think this is it. For the earth. For us. For me.’

Hermann has to stop because this cannot happen.

There is no way he can be reading his- his- his mortal enemy come best friend’s last email to him while bleeding out onto a lump of Kaiju-destroyed hotel in the San Diego sun.

Hermann had let his wounded pride get in the way of opening a damned email and Newton had committed suicide because he’d had no one to talk him down.

The pain in his leg is a dull thud compared to the pain in his chest, the lump in his throat. He feels pins and needles set in in his hands and he has to wedge the phone beneath his chin to prevent it from slipping from his grasp. He’s starting to feel light-headed now, and where before he didn’t want to open his eyes, he now cannot prevent them from fluttering shut.

He tells himself to keep awake, that he needs to keep awake, that he needs to survive, that he will be saved, but he’s so tired now, and the pain isn’t so bad when he’s drifting in his own head, and-

 

 


	2. 2019 II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said I was going to bed but I lied hah

 

* * *

 

July

Tendo laughs. He has to laugh. This must be God’s way of telling him to get his act together.

He’d been paying more attention to the man he recognised as Hermann Gottlieb than to the lady talking when the alarm went off, because Tendo had been one of the few to attend Newt’s funeral, and he hadn’t seen Gottlieb there. He could’ve sworn the two of them were close, but Gottlieb looked shocked at the mention of his death, and that that shock wasn’t the hatred of being reminded of a trauma, but the pure, unadulterated denial of an event’s happening.

The fire alarm goes off, and he’s one of the few who wonders whether he’d left a cigarette lit in his hotel room (God bless the Americans and their retaining of the smoking-indoors). Though his attention is piqued, he’s used to alarm bells, and this one barely raises his heart rate.

Tendo hadn’t been invited to this meeting personally, but he was representing the Shatterdome in which Newt had been working before his passing. They had tried to send one of their K-science kids, but none of them had talked to a University Professor for longer than a half hour, max, let alone heads of K-science that weren’t Newt. He’d just been thinking he’d been aching for a smoke, so this fire alarm might actually have been a great excuse to get out of the room for a while.

It’s the next bit that gets him.

This is the second Kaiju attack he has been victim to. Most people cannot boast that, cannot claim to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time twice. The last time was in San Francisco six years ago, and he’d lost his home, his job and his grandfather. He’d also decided that if he survived, he would officially change his name and gender on the registry, and to not just ‘look into’ gender reassignment.

He’d survived, used his measly life savings to have top surgery and started using testosterone HRT patches. They were more expensive, and daily, and he’d had rashes, and the slow masculinization was emotionally draining now that he’d decided on what he wanted, but needles made him uneasy.

Except he hadn’t started his treatments until last year. He hadn’t saved his money, he hadn’t stopped ‘looking into’ it. He hadn’t done it. His counsellor had advised him that he needn't try to achieve objectives created in on the spot, life of death situations, and he’d found himself listening to her, doubting himself...

Five more years of messing himself about because he had wanted to ‘be sure’. When he’d looked himself in the eye in the mirror this morning, adjusting his tie, pinging his braces, he’d felt like today might be a good day.

Tendo laughs. He hasn’t fully transitioned yet. He had five years, he can’t die now, he’s just started. He’s just started living as the person he’d wanted to be. He can hear the fucker outside creening and every bone in his body, every muscle, every atom jolts. He joins the frantic stream of people jostling one another to get to the basement, blank mind encouraging him to wheedle out the weak, to push to the middle for protection like penguins in a snowstorm.

When the basement doors are wrenched shut before he can be let in, he has to find somewhere else, anywhere, he has to hide, he has to get away, he has to run- if the building is going to be crushed, maybe he could run, maybe he could hotwire one of the vehicles outside and just get out, drive out of the civilised areas. He’s walking through a doorway when the building falls around him. His knees buckle and he huddles into himself, protecting his head with his arms to stop the ceiling bashing him on its way down, to drown out the sound of dying screams and crying, of the roar that has escaped from an alien throat.

Minutes feel like hours as the building just continues to fall, it’s so large, and loud and his mind cannot supply what the hotel had looked like so it plays the video of the twin towers to him, the plane replaced by an aggressive mass of muscles shot with blue, the layers of rooms collapsing in on themselves, billowing dusty smoke, the kaiju bringing itself around for another attempt at smashing them to nothing. He is so glad that they were on a lower floor, that they could file down the stairs so quickly: he wonders who had been in the penthouse suite, whether they had survived, whether they had been the first to die.

The Kaiju seems to be satisfied with its destruction of this building and its footsteps start to thud away, to find another to terrorise, and Tendo cannot believe it. He has survived a second Kaiju. He wonders what LOCCENT have named the fucker, wonders whether he should get a Newt-style tattoo in memoriam, or at least have this new bugger’s name written alongside ‘Trespasser’ on his back. This time, he swears he will try his hardest to convert to needle-administered HRT, and no-one will convince him otherwise. He’ll also quit smoking.

Tendo doesn’t want to disturb any of the destroyed building around him, lest he unlodges a stone vital to not crushing him, so he sits rock still, sleeve over his mouth and nose so that he doesn’t inhale so much of the fine particles floating in the air.

He takes out his phone, but no signal, and being a damned apple it was already at 20% battery. He didn’t want to waste it killing time, so he turned it off. He would turn it back on in a couple of hours if no rescue came. Talking of, he was getting antsy, being on this end of the screen. He was used to this moment being his, firing numbers and data at various other techs, who passed it on to men in charge, who in turn passed it on to the Jaegers. Last he knew, it was Gipsy Danger who patrolled this area, but how far away they were, and whether they had been on their shift at the time was unknown to him.

He tries counting seconds into minutes, tallying five minutes with sticks drawn in the dust with his finger, collecting 11 sticks (56 minutes, give or take,) before he hears the pounding of choppers overhead. He knows this was the most dangerous part, he knows how many people leave their hiding spots when they heard the jaegers arrive because they wanted to see the fights in action, to maybe capture the aliens for their home videos, and end up wasting their lives when they could’ve been completely safe in their own homes. So he continues to wait it out as there’s first the sound of the robot planting itself down on the ground, and then the subsequent fight.

As far as he can tell by the noises, it’s a fairly simple battle. He will watch the video of it later, as all of the survivors will, and he’ll try and spot the building he had been hiding in, but eventually there’s the sound of the beast falling, cannon fire blasting its remains to bits. He breathes out a sigh of relief and mentally cheers for the pilots, the Becket boys, who’d inadvertently saved his hide. He promises to buy them a drink.

Feeling drunk with the win and ballsy with it, he tests one of the smaller stones that has caged him in, and when it moves without bringing the whole place ontop of him, he crawls through the gap it left. He stands and looks around himself and he kisses his rosary. He has been so lucky. Whether it be wind or Kaiju or just plain miracle, the majority of the building had toppled towards the parking lot at the back instead of the road to the front, and so had saved him, who had been been buried practically in the lobby. He takes lungfuls of the fresh air and he thanks the Lord, he thanks the Becket boys, he thanks humanity for allowing him another chance at life.

From here, he can see the still-smouldering remains of the Kaiju and decides that if he tries to head towards it, he might catch a free lift back to the nearest Shatterdome, and then back to the base he’s at over in Japan. He’s careful to climb over the mounds of rubble as he escapes, listening for voices, looking out for bodies, remembering his evacuation and post-attack training as he goes.

He cuts open his hand as he grips a suspiciously wet surface that lands his palm on jagged glass, but he cannot look at it, cannot tolerate either his own blood, or look at the spillage he assumes was the blood of a recently dead other. He removes his bowtie and uses it as the least effective, but definitely most stylish makeshift tourniquet in existence, the material turning a queasy shade of purple.

Walking down the near-empty, blue blotched roads, devoid of moving traffic, of busy pedestrians, calls back memories of San Francisco he’d rather forget, so his step starts to fall quicker, until he’s jogging past the bloodied streets and burning shops.

He’d forgotten how big the monsters were until he’s only a block away from its corpse. It almost fills his entire horizon. The buildings in this area aren’t quite so wholeheartedly wrecked, but areas of the taller ones have chunks knocked out of them, replaced with dripping fluids, so he guesses that this is where most of the fight happened.

He’s breathing hard now, his lungs not having had this kind of exercise for years, not since when he’d lived in San Francisco. His breaths come out in stuttered chokes now and again, and he can feel the dust that had slipped through his shirt material and into his airways begin to clog and cloy. His eyes are watering too, so he wipes them, he can’t see, or he can see but-

His hand has come away stained with phosphorescent blue. Or no, it had been blue? He’d wiped at his eyes with his injured hand out of habit. He laughs. Of course. Of course this would happen. Of course he would run, run through clouds of the bloodmist that had been his grandfather’s cause of death with an injury infected with Kaiju blue. The laughing wasn’t helping his quick, harsh breaths to calm, and now that he focussed on them, he could see little puffs of blue vapour pouring out of his mouth like a peculiarly hued dragon’s breath on a cold day.

He was going to be the second generation of Choi to die from exposure to Kaiju blue in six years. This had been the second Kaiju he’d been attacked by in six years. This was the second time his knees buckled in the last two hours. His ears started to ring. This was a real icing to the cake. His body went into shock, and he died moments later.

 

 


	3. 2020

Hermann is putting in his contacts when he sees the face of a ghost in the correctional facility’s mirror. It has been so many years since Hermann has seen the face. It is a face he had resigned himself to never seeing again. He must be going mad- the medication must not be working- his brain must be malfunctioning- but he cannot let the face leave his vision. He follows it as face, body, person, chats with one of the doctors, his hands animated as they had been when they’d first met and laugh- jove, his laugh- illuminating and inspiring.

Not that he’d told him then. Four years of talking to this incredible academic who turned out to have an illuminating laugh. Who turned out to love the kaiju. Who turned out to be a child. Who turned out to be embarrassing, infuriating, unreasonable. Disappointing. Who had-

He’s stood behind the ghost and he looks so real, so familiar. He can’t help his voice turning questioning. “Dr. Geiszler?” He can’t produce tears and his voice can’t break but it feels like he’s doing both. Geiszler starts at Hermann’s voice. He has stopped laughing. He turns around. He’s wearing the same smile he’d been wearing at the airport when he’d picked Hermann up the first time they’d met- a timid reclusiveness, a wild excitement schooled into barely-there politeness.

“Hey, Herms.” Newton looks- vampiric. Pale. Tired.

Hermann bites the inside of his lower lip. He can’t feel it, he’s probably biting through the flesh, he doesn’t care. He puffs himself up like a small animal being threatened by something new and different and scary. Hermann doesn’t know what to do with himself now that he’s found him. He’d hoped. He’d hoped so much, and now that the moment was here, all of his plans were lost to him, all of the things he’d told himself to say didn’t seem adequate.

“Hermann?” Newt takes a step closer, white eyed, pale faced, smile slipping. “What… why’re you here?” He hesitates, tries to laugh again, dismissive. “Come to pick me up?” he asks, hopefully, the smile pulling just a little too taut on one side of his face. Newton is wearing long sleeves and he fiddles with them now, pulling his hands down into them, gripping the hems closed around his fists.

Hermann shakes his head. Still biting his lip, his hand rises to the back of his neck, touches timidly at the ridges of the injection hole. He watches Newton’s face crash, its protective borders coming under too much pressure from his emotion.

“But- I-” Newton’s shoulders are shaking and he lets go of his shirt sleeves, allowing his hands to grip into fists.“Did you...”

Hermann’s eyes screw into a rage-induced squint and he snorts. This was it. This was the anger he needed to reboot his system, to flush away his voiceless desires and replace them with well-deserved fury. “Did I throw my life away? Did I give up? Did I commit suicide?” Hermann asks for him. “Perhaps I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders, perhaps I was tormented by the lack of a solution, the countless toll, the endless, sleepless nights with nothing but-” Hermann pauses in his quotation of the email he’d long-since memorised, his mind needing the breather more than his lungs.

Newton seizes the opportunity when it arises with a quietness too unlike him, too unlike the anger that is always baited between them. “You think I don’t know what I did?” The man spreads his arms wide, as if encompassing the planet, the movement jerking the fabric up. At this, Hermann cuts off his own interjection. He has to drag his eyes away from Newton’s wrists. They’re large, ugly scars and he hates them. He hates what they mean, he hates what they did, he hates who did them.

“I tried to kill the world when I killed myself, Hermann. I slit my wrists so that humanity could give up. To just let it happen, swift and painless.” He shrugs, a full body movement. “And I end up here. Alive again. Some Rockstar.”

What so bad about being alive? Hermann wants to ask, but there’s something in Newton’s expression that stop him, something haunted. Newton looks defeated. In the silence, Hermann can hear the gathering crowd around them whispering, speculating. It’s not unusual for sufferers to argue their position in the world, and Hermann hunts for clues in their chinese whisper-like rumours. One phrase stops his roaming ear and he comes in full focus.

“...experimented on...”

Experimented on? This facility was used to administer the drugs that made them complacent, that prevented them from their rabid state, but... experimented on?

Hermann had been rabid for a long time. He hadn’t killed many, couldn’t move fast enough to enjoy being a successful predator with his busted hip, but he’d risen in a secluded enough environment that he’d not been captured until recently.

Newton’s body must have been kept in the PPDC’s cemetery, if the meeting was anything to go by. A chill, figment of his imagination or not, ran down Hermann’s back. If bodies had been rising, the military burial ground must have been hot property for scouts: to get back the strongest fighters? The most talented officers? The ones harbouring the most secrets? Newton must have been one of the first in this horrific, prison-like hospital. And who, Hermann realised, would debate clinical trials of medicines, vaccines or cures on the recently-risen recently-departed?

Hermann deflates. He wants to know what they had done to Newton in the months he had been mindless. He wants to know how mindless Newton had remained as they tested on him, whether he felt any of it, whether it had terrified him. Hermann knew Newton, and he can certainly theorise how quick it would be to associate experimenting on a rotter to experimenting on a kaiju. Both were monsters: surreal, fictional, apocalyptic. Both were harbingers of death, both were medical mysteries. Newton was a damned fan of the alien invaders anyway, he did not need this additional association to screw him over one final time.

Hermann wondered how final this information would be, how often the sensation of dreadful revelation would hit him within the next few years. That was assuming he would live much longer, he wasn’t entirely sure, as the whole of humanity currently wasn’t, where he stood on average life expectancy from now on.

His demeanor changes, reverts back to the humped-back mathematician. “I died in an attack in San Diego.” Hermann recites, as he has done numerous times in the last few days. He has recited it to doctors, to fellow cell members, to his family, to himself. “I had been invited to a conference about the future of the science division after your… passing. The kaiju attacked the building we were in and razed it to the ground. I was impaled during the attack and could not escape before I lost too much blood. I died on July 22nd, 2019. What I did in my untreated state was not my fault.” The last is unintentional, a ritual drilled into him, and he can see Newton flinch when he says it.

The crowd around them starts to murmur and disperse as guards watch them suspiciously, shifting closer at both men’s stinging words. “Did it hurt?” Newton asks, lowering his arms and voice as his attention is caught by a guard pointing in their direction.

“It was hours of excruciating pain, culminating in an undignified, isolated death that came slowly and fragmentally,” Hermann tells him, bitterly but quietly. He did not have the courage to end his own life, even when he’d been forced unconscious by the endless pain. He had clung so dearly to the hope of survival, of rescue, of miraculous escape that the idea of clutching a shard of shattered window pane to his heart, or even to swallow the box of pills had seemed obscene at the time.

“I didn’t read your email until that day,” Hermann whispers, hoarse with the difficulty of admitting it. “I didn’t know, I didn’t know what you’d done, I didn’t attend your funeral, I couldn’t send my condolences.”

Now it seems it’s Newton who doesn’t know what to do with himself, who is trapped, wordless, on the spot. “I wondered if you’d read it.”

“I wish I had replied, I wish I had told you how much you had to live for-”

Newton winces. “I mean, I sent it posthumously, which, by the way, was the hardest thing i’ve ever done on a computer, and, er,  looking back, was kinda a dick move, but I kinda hoped you’d delete it on sight.” He shrugs, avoiding Hermann’s eye. “Though those notes on the pimension were a killer to scan,  so I hope you’ve read them.”

Hermann snorts involuntarily, at how easily Newton could defuse a situation. “Of course I read them. Post-rising of course. I found your handwriting utterly undecipherable. Honestly, it’s a miracle you’ve risen, else I’d have had to have slogged through the rest of your works of my own volition. Now I can have you make an electronic transcript before you deign to criticise the rest of my theories.”

Newt doesn’t know whether to be happy. He’s happy, of course, that Hermann has risen, that he seems like he wants them to be friends, maybe, but he’s a zombie. They’re both zombies. He’s still not too cool with that. And there was no precedent for a PDS-suffering genius scientist who’d committed suicide in an act of rebellion against the government. Who exactly would hire him? Who would give him a research grant? Who would put him in charge of saving the world?

“I guess it’ll give me something to do while we’re in here,” he says, and Hermann looks so relieved, Newt smiles. His smiles seem to be lasting less and less time nowadays though, because the guard who’d been pointing at them earlier is now stood besides them. He has a guest, too, who looks like he’s disgusted to be so near them.

The guard points at the two of them, naming them in turn. “This’un’s Geiszler, that’s Gottlieb.”

The man looks down on them, potentially metaphorically as well as physically. He has a looming, terrifying disposition that makes Hermann take a step back and Newton shrink into himself.

He nods at them. “And Choi?” The guard tells them to behave as he backtracks to the cells in search of the third man. While they wait, the man introduces himself as “Marshall Stacker, PPDC,” but then remains stoic and disdainful.

“PPDC?” Newt feels Hermann’s breath in his ear as he whispers. “For us?”


	4. 2021

PDS sufferers are conscripted into the emptying Shatterdomes when there are too few alive and too many that should be dead. At the same time, the UN begins cutting funds from the Jaeger program in order to pay for their Wall of Life. They tell a recently promoted Stacker Pentecost that he doesn’t need the money now that he has an army of the risen. He draws the line at having PDS workers in high-vis jackets because he already has to deal with working with the fuckers, he does not need to be reminded who he can and cannot trust.

“Everyone! Listen up.” There are hundreds of them, uncomfortable being stood to attention in their neat lines. There are rangers, techs, scientists in the making, ordered alphabetically by name so that the cocky are mixed in with the weak. They are a sea of cover-up mousse and contact lenses, and Pentecost avoids looking at any of them in particular. They look too human.

“Today you will be sorted into your respective divisions, thanks to the Give Back Scheme. This is your second chance, your chance at redeeming yourself after your actions in your untreated state. There are some of you who have been placed already, and those of you with your instructions can stay behind with me at the end. The rest of you will take three tests. The test you do the best in, you are put in.” His tone is deadpan, he tolerates no questions. “Highest marks in athletics, you’re a Ranger. Highest marks in Communication, you’re a Tech. Highest mark in Non Verbal Reasoning, you’re in Science. Have I made myself clear?”

There’s a chorus of “Sir, yes, Sir”.

“Good. This is Ranger Hansen. He will be taking you to your first test. Dismissed!”

Herc starts to stride away, and the crowd of blue material shuffles off after him, leaving a handful of faces left. He recognises the three he’d picked up from the correctional facility a couple of months before, who had apparently bonded on their trip over, and had screwed their alphabetical order by standing together. Then there were the few candidates he had been given who had either volunteered or requested Ranger status, and had passed the rudimentary tests already. There were the 3 brothers he recognised as the Wei triplets, and a girl. A girl who he recognised, and seemed to be having the same reaction.

Her hairstyle is the same, with its dyed tips, and the hope in her expression mirrors that which she had worn, but her eyes are a dull brown, her skin an orange-y white. Stacker shakes himself out of the thought of her, knowing that the six other men were starting to wonder what was so interesting about the girl.

“Right, you lot.” He drags his eyes to the two Germans, who had started to bicker already. His eye twitched and he cleared his throat. “Right, you lot,” he says again, and the two cease immediately, the taller of the two flinching slightly. Stacker knew that that one would be a pushover to deal with, but the other, the shorter one, he’d been marked as troublesome even before his death.

“Gottlieb. Geiszler. You’re the new heads of Science. Congrats.” Stacker looks at his clipboard so that he doesn’t have to watch Gottlieb’s face. They know how they got their jobs. PDS or not, they’re two of the only Kaiju scientists left alive. Gottlieb had watched them all die, and none of them had risen.

Apart from the other man standing besides him, who stands straighter when addressed. “Choi. You’re in LOCCENT again. Promotion to J-Tech Chief Officer. Congrats.” Geiszler gives him a rough clap on the back, and Choi grins out a ‘thanks’.

“Wei Tang brothers. You passed the test. You’re Rangers. Congrats.” The kids look smug and elbow each other, saying something under their breath.

“Mako Mori. You passed the test. You’re a Ranger. Congrats.” He feels breathless at her exhilaration. It’s the same look she’d had on her face when they had landed, when she had run towards them, when her fingers had so nearly touched his.

“Rangers, this is your commanding officer, Ranger Martin. She will take you to your post. Do you understand?”

The four snap to attention with near-startling synchronicity. “Sir, yes, Sir.” He dismisses them and they are led away, leaving him with the problem children.

“You three are not new around these parts,” Stacker starts. “Before you rose, you were already members of the Corps, and this means,” he says, pacing in front of them, “That I expect you to set your fellow sufferers an example.” The three of them look down. Gottlieb may have the looks of an old man, but they were all young, barely out of their twenties. “This means,” he repeats, “You take your shots on time. You wear your compulsory Mousse and Contacts at all times. You clean in your allocated shower times and room, and it means,” he concludes, “That if a Living person asks, you must tell them that you are PDS, and that you are compliant, and give them the time and date of your last injection. Do I make myself clear?”

Their responding “Yes, Sir,” is not quite so synchronised.

“Good. Choi, you’re with me, I’ll take you to LOCCENT. Gottlieb, Geiszler, you know where your labs are. I expect you to be starting tomorrow morning. Are we clear?”

Gottlieb salutes with a “Yes, Sir,” while Geiszler just nods. He dismisses them and they limp off down the corridor.

* * *

 

Stacker watches the newest recruits train with a distinct feeling of disgust. It had taken weeks to filter out the truly hopeless of the mandatorily conscripted rotters. Nevermind those who were averse to fighting, those could be hardened by training and through war, but without an age or health cap as most war conscriptions had, their army was a too-accurate portrayal of those who would have died- men and women past retirement age who could barely stumble, let alone run, business workers who’d not seen a day’s exercise since before the attacks, and the middle-aged groups who he watched dotter about in disdain.

The UN had no protocol on how to train these ‘soldiers’ now that they were here and under Stacker’s control, and they had taken to telling him that he was responsible for them, that if he truly could not handle them, he should have them shot. They were, after all, PDS. No-one could miss them.

Stacker could imagine the public outcry at the mass slaughter of ‘people’ they had stolen from correctional facilities, so he created a fourth category to filter them into; the ‘Sanitary Engineering Corp.’ It was simple. They cleaned the laundry. They build chain link fences. They learnt how to fix showers, unclog sewers that had been tainted by the spewed up rotted blood from idiot recruits who’d been tempted to eat or drink, and they made the food for the few who could still digest. They also learnt how to inject the medication that needed to be needled into the backs of several thousand necks every ‘lunch’ time.

To be put in the SEC became a threat to the newest recruits. It was a pretty obvious sign of ineptitude: that even as a PDS sufferer, you weren’t worth dying for your planet. Of course, to some, ‘dying for your planet’ was no more respectable than mopping floors, but Stacker had seen who became the grunt in the bullying, the social hierarchy of the workplace dependant, as ever, on machismo. It was a self-regulating system, a self-regenerating way to keep them all in their places, and out of Stacker’s mind. The living Rangers beat down the PDS, the PDS Rangers took out their frustration on the PDS SEC. The techs were not quite so useless as to have any Ranger risk the repercussion of harming one, and the techs had no doubts that the SEC would take revenge on their belongings if they tried to join with the bullying.

The PDS Rangers are below him now, swinging their wooden weapons in attempted synchronised attacks. Herc Hansen is calling out a regular “One, two,” interspersed with Drill Sergeant attacks on their subpar performance. Even without the SEC, the Rangers are a meager bunch. They are despondent, low in morale and overworked. They may not tire physically, but Stacker had had to read countless anonymous reports of mental fatigue. Apparently the dead could still be depressed.

He headed down the steps, back straight, glaring at any of the Rangers who raised their eyes instead of focusing on their actions. He stood beside Hansen until the man was done with his exercise. They exchanged nods and Hansen fell back, calling the Rangers to attention.

“Rangers,” Stacker says as way of greeting. He surveys them, just willing any not to conform, to have not put on an adequate amount of Mousse, to not have put in their contacts. His glances do not pull up any who fit the description. “Three PDS sufferers from this Shatterdome have been detained for illegal possession of the drug ‘Blue Oblivion’ this week alone. The possession of this substance is, according to UN laws, punishable by death.” A couple of the Rangers shift, and he marks them in his mind. “There is zero tolerance to non-compliancy. You will get no trial. You will be shot on sight. Do not make us waste bullets on you while there is still a war going on out there.”

He sees the room bristle and he stands that little bit straighter, just willing any of them to speak back at him. The air is tense, and he knows he has made enemies of them all. Good, he thinks. “If you have any information about non-compliant sufferers, you will come to me immediately. Are we clear?”

“Pulsebeater scum!” The silence after the shout is almost ethereal. Nobody moves for full seconds before those next to the owner of the voice scramble away from her, taking refuge among their other innocents. The woman does not let Stacker drop her stare, bringing a fist up and slowly uncurling her fingers to reveal a blue capsule.

Before the woman can bring the pill to her mouth, there’s a bullet in her head and she crumples to the floor. Stacker returns his gun to its holster. “Are. We. Clear.”

There’s a slight hesitation before the “Sir,” this time, and he doesn’t let his smile show on his face. “Hansen,” he says, before relinquishing his command on the recruits and heading back to his office.

As he turns, he can see a simmering Geiszler waiting for him just off to the side, hidden half in shadow as if to keep himself out of view. Stacker sighs. He’s not had a problem with either scientist since they’d arrived, but from the look being given to him, he doesn’t hold up much hope for the future.

“Dr. Geiszler,” he says as he stops in front of the man. It was a show of how pissed Geiszler was that he didn’t correct Stacker with his usual ‘call me Newt’ jibe, just continues to puff himself bigger.

Geiszler brings a trembling hand up to his glasses, pushing them up the bridge of his nose. “Why are there caged people in my lab.”

Stacker sets his jaw, then starts to walk, pausing just slightly to make sure the shorter man follows. “They were caught after having consumed Oblivion. They are rabid. I wish for you use them in your experiments regarding the drift.”

“Mad,” Geiszler tries to correct. “They went mad, not ‘rabid’. And they are people who made a mistake. Let me have their medication and they can return to their jobs.”

“They’re non-compliant, Doctor. You know what that means.”

“Then shoot them! Last I checked, human experimentation was still banned by UN laws!”

Stacker raises his voice slightly, his tone shifting. “Those creatures are not human.”

Geiszler does a full stop and just gapes at him, his brows furrowing into something far beyond rage. “We,” he finally says. “We are human. If you don’t collect them in the next hour I’m setting them free.” He pushes past Stacker and heads in the opposite direction to his lab.

 

* * *

 

Hermann finds Newt when he’s curled up in a rarely-used laboratory, shaking and racked with dry, tear-less sobs. Newt’s taken to using the room more and more frequently recently, and this is not the first time Hermann has had to slide down besides him and try to convince him to return to civilisation.

“I can’t even cry,” Newt spits bitterly, “I’m so angry and I can’t even cry.” It comes out muffled as he speaks into the arm he has thrown over his face.

“You’re a biologist. You of all people should know that the dead cannot weep.”

“Maybe we’re not human. Maybe Stacker’s right. We can’t undergo metabolism, we don’t maintain homeostasis, we can’t grow, reproduce, we’re practically unclassifiable as living organisms!” He laughs, and he knows Hermann winces beside him.

Newt can sense Hermann sitting back from where he’d been leaning over him, can hear the material of his trousers ruffle as his legs stretch out on the floor.  “We are not living organisms, Newton,” he says quietly after a while.

“Then what are we?” Newt replies, equally as quiet. He remains in a ball, talking to the floor. In the darkness of the emergency-light lit room, he can’t see the off-colour of his skin, only feels the detachment that comes with being unable to feel the cold of the floor, unable to feel any comfort from what he knows is Hermann’s hand on his shoulder.

“I do not know.” Hermann’s voice contains none of the anger that Newton’s does, just a deep seated apologeticness. “But… Important, I think.” Hermann exhales air in a show of mirth, and Newt turns a little to watch him, lip pulled up in one corner and staring at a far wall, but obviously not seeing it.

“Important?” Newt repeats in a weak voice, sounding child-like even in his own ears.

“Why else would we be here, if not because we were important?” He drops his eyes to meet Newt’s, and there’s no humour in them; the smile is one that contains more sorrow than cheer, one that has seen desolation. But there’s a sparkle, Newt realises, of hope, that lights them up like the stars.

Newt allows himself to be lifted to his feet and Hermann returns him to his room before limping off back to his lab.

 

* * *

 

“Newton.”

Newt ignores the voice at the door. Even if he couldn’t recognise the voice, only one person calls him ‘Newton’ these days.

“Newton, open this damned door, right this minute.”

Newt rolls his eyes and stays where he is behind his desk, clicking keys on his laptop’s keyboard. Maybe if he ignores the man at the door, he’ll go away of his own volition. Nobody could stand the shame of standing outside a locked room for very long, let alone Hermann. Especially Hermann. Prideful, prideful Herms. True to character, the incessant knocking goes away after a couple of minutes, followed by a loud huff and the clack of a cane down the corridor.

Newt relaxes in his seat, eyes momentarily glancing at the door as if he could follow Hermann’s movements down the corridor. Then he returns to the bright screen that’s kept him locked in his room for three days without contact to the outside world.


	5. 2023

2023

There’s a knock on Stacker’s door. He lets out a gruff “Come in,” and the door unlocks, swinging to reveal an agitated Mako Mori. He puts down his pen, paperwork abandoned for now, and sits up from where he’d been slouching. It was an old habit that died hard, even for a long-serving officer like himself. It’s the first time they’ve been in close quarters since before the rising.

“Miss Mori.” When she doesn’t reply with her intentions, just steps into the room, he continues. “Do you have something to report?”

This makes her look up, something sharp in her eyes. He has read her report: she had been a black belt in MMA before her death, looking to study at Tokyo University, and was now top of her class in strategic warfare, currently held the undefeated title of most wins in the Ranger training dojo, all topped with ILR Level 4 Proficiency in English, learnt in the three years she had spent working for the PPDC. If Stacker had a favourite, she would be it, PDS be damned.

“I would like permission to participate in Dr. Geiszler’s experimentations.”

Stacker frowns before he can freeze his expression into stony indifference. “You’re too much of a valuable asset.”

“That is why I would like to try. Perhaps if the stronger of mind were to be given a chance…”

Stacker had not put the girl down as cocky, but he knew that that was what made the best pilots. An unwavering sense of deservedness. “Too many of the experiments have failed. I forbid it.”

“I wish to be a pilot. I wish to take the drop test and start training to be a Jaeger pilot.”

“I know what you wish for, Miss Mori, but until the doctor’s experiments start producing more than blackouts and dead sufferers, I will not give you clearance.”

“But Sir,” she pleads, before going back on herself and regaining her more civilised tone. “Sir. I am volunteering for a project whose only criteria is full acknowledgement of the risks and complete consent. I know the risks and I give my consent.”

Stacker sighs, standing. “This isn’t a discussion, Miss Mori.”

“Why will you let countless others die needlessly when I could-”

“This isn’t a discussion,” he repeats over her. “When Dr. Geiszler’s results are reliable, you will be tested for competency as a pilot. Until then, you put your head down, you do what I say, and you get out of my office.”

She looks like she is burning with resentment, and it’s a look he’s received from too many of the people he has respected in his life not to feel the sharp pain in his heart. The door is closed too hard in his face in a way that would have gotten any other Ranger reprimanded and thrown out into the streets. He clenches his fists and returns to his paperwork.

It is only minutes later that he gets a second visitor. “Come in,” he shouts, his mood thinly veiled.

Herc Hansen enters, an eyebrow raised. “That’s some tone you’ve got there,” he says, before adding a wary “Sir” when Stacker’s face tells him he’s not in the mood for joking.

“Long day,” Stacker bites out, crushing his pen in his grip.

“‘fraid I’m about to make it longer for you,” Hansen says, dropping a manila folder on his desk.

Stacker rubs at his eyes, not reaching for it as he leans back in his chair.

“Four SEC reported MIA this month. None reported by officers. We suspect hate crime by non-PDS Rangers.”

“Were the bodies dealt with?”

He hears Hansen clear his throat. “Yes, Sir.”

“And the rumours?”

“Some are claiming that it was us, Sir. Or that they have escaped to join the ‘ULA’.”

“Keep it circulating that it was us. Claim Blue Oblivion. Quash any mention of the ULA.”

“Yes, Sir.” Stacker keeps his eyes closed and assumes Hansen has left until there’s a voice nearer the door. “Sir?”

“Yes, Ranger.”

“What about the prevention of future deaths?”

Stacker opens his eyes at that. He frowns at Hansen. “They were PDS sufferers.”

Hansen has risen his eyebrow again, but this time he seems displeased. “Yes Sir. And so am I. What about the prevention of future deaths.”

Stacker appraises him from his seat. This is the third time he’d been criticized for dismissing a sufferer too quickly, and this time he still had the memory of Mako Mori’s anger cutting at his conscience. “I’ll leave it to you to look into.”

“Sir.”

 

* * *

 

The Undead Liberation Army has gained a lot of attention very quickly, very internationally, and Tendo has been watching its progress since it first appeared on the internet a couple of months ago. The original website is rudimentary at best, a black background with white font as if made in the early 2000s, and password protected with a Bible quote that makes it seem like the whole blog is created by a teenager: “I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.”- Revelations 1.18.

The thing that caught his attention, however, was that the background of the video posted on the site of this would-be Prophet was very clearly a bunk in a Shatterdome. It had made him sit forwards and bite his thumb, and though he was on night shift, and had a camera on every door into his room, he had looked over his shoulder all the same.

With a heavy heart, he had run a scan on the site, wondering whether he could find it’s vague location in the world in order to pinpoint which Shatterdome had the starting of an uprising housed within it, but holding little hope considering a community like this must be run by someone with at least basic hacking know-how. He had closed the window with a fierce click as ‘Hong Kong’ had flashed on the screen.

Three months after, and he had knocked the Prophet down to three people, none of whom he wanted to see in that position.

Herc Hansen was the first, having led the private investigation into, and subsequent capture of the Rangers who had killed the SECs last year. Very few knew about this endeavour though, and Tendo wanted to think that the leader of the ULA would use the situation to at least ruffle some feathers.

Mako Mori was his second option, having had strong opinions on the treatment of her fellow sufferers since the day she’d arrived. According to intel Tendo had collected, she’d been raising the issue of PDS rights within the Shatterdome to none other than the Marshall himself, which took more than balls of steel: it took connections. But would Marshall Pentecost, a man known for his less-than-accepting opinion on the PDS situation, really maintain ‘connections’ with the ULA Prophet?

The third was Newton Geiszler. Too quiet, too twitchy Newton Geiszler, who’d Risen angry, suffocated and betrayed. Tendo finished his shift with the vigour of a man who’d not been concentrating on his job, and headed down towards the K-Science labs.

He knocked on the door and waited until he could hear shouting before he entered. At least with shouting, he knew where he stood with the two of them, and could more easily convince Geiszler to abandon his post with him. Sometimes the two of them were a solidarity even he could not broach: he had seen them sit besides one another for hours in the correctional facility without moving, not necessitating bodily functions other than brain and mouth to fire theories at one another.

“Tendo, tell Herms that as we discovered last month in that completely scientific analysis of the floor level, it is not straight, and as such, as GRAVITY is still a thing, liquids that might have fallen to the floor are not my responsibility if they happen to leak across his line!”

“Oh do shut up, Newton,” came Hermann’s reply. “Your ‘experiment’, which consisted of little more than yourself and Mr. Choi here lying on a floor after sheep-brain inebriation does not count as ‘scientific’ in the slightest.  Isn’t that right, Mr. Choi?”

Both men turned to Tendo, who grinned. “Sorry, boys, I’m strictly impartial in all K-Science matters. That is, unless, Newt here accepts my offer and buys me a drink?”

Newt doesn’t even have the courtesy to look concerned by the sudden offer, practically jumping over his desk in order to latch onto Tendo, pulling him out of the room to the background noise of Hermann’s sputtering.

When they’re out of the Shatterdome, Newt lets Tendo take the lead, and he maneuvers them down brightly lit and winding alleys into the heart of Hong Kong, an area Newt tells Tendo he has yet to have explored.

“Good,” Tendo says over the noise of the crowd. “Means I can be the first to introduce you to the best bar in the city.”

Tendo cuts the smalltalk once he’s sat Newt down at the back of a greaser-style American bar, and has put two drinks between them. “We’re colleagues,” Tendo says, and Newt nods amiably around his milkshake. “And friends,” he continues, to which he is given another nod. Tendo shifts slightly closer. “Revelations. One point eighteen.”

He watches as Newton freezes, his lips dropping the straw he’d been pretending to drink. His eyes darken slightly, and Tendo is quick to carry on. “I need a favour, and in return, I’m willing to protect your hide.”

Newt pushes the drink away from himself, but says nothing, which Tendo takes as a good sign. “It doesn’t take a doxxer to find out where your website is hosted, and I am far from the best. What I am, is able to put some safeguards up so it can’t be linked with you.”

“And in return?” Newt asks, evidently trying not to sound overwhelmed and betrayed.

Tendo smooths the hair to the side of his head. He catches Newt’s eye and holds it. “It’s been three years since my prescription for HRT was annulled.”

Newt doesn’t seem to be breathing, which should worry Tendo, but Newt nods, almost imperceptibly, willing him to go on.

“Because of the PDS, this means my body hasn’t regressed, it’s remained in the state it was left when I died. I still had years of treatment to go.”

Newt nods again. “You want me to see if there’s a way to get dead cells to respond to HRT.”

Tendo fiddles with his own glass, wiping patterns into the condensation on the cool surface.

“Tendo I…” Newt stops, and Tendo looks up. There’s a lot of weight resting on those shoulders, Tendo realised, seeing how hunched Newt looked. He wonders what Newt had looked like just before he’d died. Whether the weight he carried was similar back then. “I’ll try.”

Tendo gulps, a dry and unnecessary gesture. “Thank you.”

 

* * *

 

“Where did you and Mr. Choi disappear to, yesterday?” Hermann asks, like he doesn’t care, as if smalltalk is normal between them.

“We had a hot, hot, passionate date,” Newt says, lackluster, as he pipettes another drop of way-too-expensive-to-budget liquid into a petri dish.

“Oh.” Newt looks up in time to catch Hermann dropping his eyes, and Newt finds himself taken aback.

“I’m- I’m joking, he wanted to ask me if I knew that girl, what’s her name, Alison? From, er, whassit, that J-Tech division. Munitions officer, met her in Anchorage.”

Hermann seems wary, but follows him up. “You mean the happily-married-to-another-man Alison?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.” Hermann shakes his head, tutting like a middle-aged woman. ”Tendo said, and I quote, ‘one day, she’s going to be mine’, before downing a beer and promptly spewing it back up again.” Newt knows he’s covered the story well because Hermann rolls his eyes and pretends to turn a queasy shade, as if he could.

“How ghastly. I trust you did not follow suit?”

“You know me, Herms, always giving in to peer pressure.” He adjusts his microscope, pushing his glasses up so that they rest on the top of his head, and settles in for a long shift watching dead cells predictably not react to anything. “First jealousy, now worry, really Herms, people will talk.”

He looks up when he hears a pen clattering to the floor, but Hermann is no longer in the room, and he puts it down to the man’s near-constant search for chalk.

 

* * *

 

Hermann well and truly fit the description his primary-school fellows had given him: “a bit of a loner.” He didn’t mind company, per say, but the company had to be appropriate, educated, and able to argue back, otherwise Hermann just got angry and stalked away at the first possible chance.

But then he’d started to realise that even with appropriate, educated and argumentative peers, he still got angry and stalked away, especially when he cared about them enough not to jeopardize driving them away too far. This was particularly notable in his family environment.

He’d cared for his brothers, of course, in that way where one respected and admired one’s blood and yet yearned for the appreciation that they got purely for being the eldest and the youngest, and he cared for his sister extraordinarily, falling into the ‘protective dolt’ role spectacularly, where he did her homework for her instead of chasing after her bullies (not that Karla would ever have tolerated a bully in her Empire).

He wanted his Father to accept him, as every pompous young Englishman did, countrywide. He wanted his Father to pat him on the back and to tell him that he had done a good job well, to offer him a scotch and a seat in his armchair by the fire.

And then Hermann had had the radical idea of dying, and the even better one to Rise. Oh how his Father had been livid.

Apparently, Hermann had been given a hero’s death, as if his dying had been his crowning glory. His Father had spared no expense in his burial, his service was well attended by the well-to-do, and they all respected the man who had lost his not-quite-first son in the war that was being waged in a far-off country.

Apparently, his father had funded and founded the Human Volunteer Force in the English Countryside where they had a Summer Mansion, his home during his annual hunting getaway.  

Apparently, all but one of his family were decorated HVF veterans, with more dead and cremated rotters between them than the rest of the village. As their reputation had spread, more and more of the country had taken up arms against the threat they suddenly had, deciding that if the rest of the world would face the Kaiju, they would face the Zombies.

Hermann was not told any of this first-hand, because none of his family came to see him in the correctional facility after the medicine that prevented their symptoms was developed.

Well.

His Father had visited him. They had sat opposite one another, backs ramrod straight, staring at one another with distrustful caution, until Hermann had greeted him with a “Good Afternoon, Father.”

“You can talk?” Was all Lars Gottlieb had said before his brows pinched.  “I wasn’t informed you could talk. This changes everything.” Then he had stood, marched out, and Hermann hadn’t had contact since, even as family members started to pour in and collect their long-lost loved ones.

When Hermann had been given access to the internet, (see: had stolen access of the internet in the facility’s library,) he had checked his emails to see a stomach-churning amount of them. The professional ones mostly stopped in the weeks around his death, but as Hermann scrolled, he could see that Karla had sent an email a week since his death, right up until his Father had ‘visited’ him.

The emails were like diary entries, Karla talking about her partner, their child, her in-laws, her nieces and nephews, how her child was the most intelligent child of the lot of them, how it must have been Hermann’s influence on the baby-shower that had made the child so intelligent, when Karla had wanted an artistic child, how it was all his fault that her child’s grades were starting to fall, when the child could have had such a great tutor, how she just couldn’t understand even the most basic mathematics, and here, have a photo of our child, aren’t they cute? And hey, Hermann, you dummkopf, who’s going to be the intelligent uncle to my second child, huh? Now that you’re gone who’s going to organise the baby-shower, you know Bastien’s just not the right person to do that kind of thing, and Dieterich wouldn’t so much as phone them nowadays, really, that boy was just like his father, and hey, Hermann, did you know that the dead had started rising? Did you know that father had started a zombie-killing army? Hey Hermann, how absurd was it that their family was the foundation of a group straight out of one of those science-fiction films you used to like? Hey Hermann, I hope you stay dead because I do not want to see you like those damned rotters out there, they’ve been killing more and more of the living lately, and there’s no end to them, and they’re terrifying, and they thought they’d been safe where the Kaiju couldn’t reach them, and now there was this, and hey, Hermann, did you know that it doesn’t take long to disassociate killing rotters to killing humans? Hey, Hermann, do you remember that supermarket we used to go to up at the countryhouse? Well i’ve just shot at someone who looked too much like you in the crisp aisle on a mission and you’d been gorging on my best friend’s brains and hey, Hermann? Please, please, stay away for us.

So Hermann had been alone, then. All he had were emails from his dead friend, the family he’d been banished from, and the job that would never hire him again. He’d been so- abandoned. By the humanity he’d tried so hard to live for. But he had a stiff upper lip, and he wouldn’t complain. He was alive, wasn’t he? Surely that was proof that there was something worth living for? That was what he had told himself, wasn’t it? That he was going to live because he was alive?

And then he had seen Newton and there it was, there was something to live for, because there was someone he really could think about, who had wanted to form a relationship, who needed someone else to be scared with, to worry about, to make him feel like he wasn’t just a reanimated corpse, and it was brilliant, brilliant Newton-

-and brilliant, brilliant Newton had locked himself in his room, would only give him monosyllabic replies when he shared the lab, who went out of his way to avoid Hermann; even their arguments veered into the spiteful rather than the technological, and when Newton joked about Hermann’s feelings, it hurt Hermann like nothing else could, because this was the only person he had thought could still care about him on the planet, who there might be a hope in Heaven might like him, but apparently, he was wrong.

 

* * *

 

Hermann was too full of hope. Hermann was too innocent. He had come out of the Rising thankful and obedient, and it meant that Hermann was surviving in the environment they had been put in, and Newt couldn’t taint that.

When he had thought of joining the ULA, Hermann had been the first person he had wanted to tell, the first person he had wanted to join, until he had seen how Hermann had looked at him, as if Newt was a galaxy bursting to be observed, to be wondered at, and it had terrified Newt because he had died because he thought that nobody would ever look at him like that again, and if he thought about that too much, it hurt, because then neither of them would have died, and neither would have Risen, and they might have met again, and then, then, something could have happened between them, whether it be friendship, companionship or more, but not now, because Newt had destroyed that.

And Hermann knew how to deal with computers. He knew how to hack, as was evident by his ability to gain unrestricted, unmonitored internet access on a library computer in a PDS correctional facility, he knew how to code, and he knew how to find things out. Newt would stand no chance in hiding his ‘secret identity’ if they shared any intimate space. It would be best for Hermann to keep his distance, for them to return to their wordless stand-off, for Newt to focus on the PPDC’s requests, on Tendo’s requests, on the ULA’s requests. If anything, he’s only got busier since death. Someone must be dancing on his grave.

Hermann’s insistence that Newt spend at least a couple of hours in the lab with him have gotten stronger as of late, and that’s why, as he pushes the door open this morning, he has gone au naturale: no contacts to hide his split, yellow eyes, no mousse to cover his waxy pallor.

“Better late than never, I suppose… Newton you do realise that it’s almost half past…” Hermann’s voice rolls to a stop as he turns to Newt. “...you-” Hermann must notice how Newt has set his features, because he frowns. “You cannot do this, Newton.”

“Do what?” Newt asks, blasé. He pushes his glasses up with one hand, and slips behind his desk as nonchalantly as he can.

“You know exactly what.”

“Nobody comes in here anyway. I was late. I have work to do, unlike some, Herms.”

“Newton.” Hermann’s voice is the harshest he’s ever heard it, which is quite the achievement. “This is not some… some game of Political Chicken. They will shoot you,” he says, and if Newt had a heart to break, that would have done it. “They will not hesitate because you have proven yourself intelligent, they will see you are non-compliant and they with kill you.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Newt covers his face with the microscope and adamantly does not look up until long after the doors have slammed shut.

The labs are silent for the next three days and he doesn’t leave them, not needing to rest, not needing to sleep. At least that was one pro, he didn’t need his typical diet of coffee and energy drinks to make himself last.

On the fourth day, he can almost swear he has a crick in his neck, and his legs buckle twice before dawn. He’s avoided doing it since he’d taken his makeup off, but he glances at his reflection in a pane of glass and recoiles. If he didn’t look normal before, the almost eighty hour marathon did not help. At all. He looked- he looks like a corpse. He looks dead. He hadn’t looked dead before, just ill.

Ill- shit- in his vigil, he hadn’t taken his Neurotriptyline, either PPDC provided, or home brewed. He didn’t trust the government’s green-hued injections, not when he’d made his own and it had come out the same shade of orange no matter how many times he’d repeated it. He fumbles in his desk for his secret stash, hands noticeably shaky, but he must not have replaced the vials after he’d last taken them, and he knew his only other ones were in his room-

His room is further away than medical, and he doesn’t trust them, but- his knees buckle for the third time and yep, there it was decided, he has to go to medical. He can’t make it to his room without some misinformed dick shooting him. He shucks on an infrequently worn lab-coat and grabs a clipboard, as if they could help him look professional and in a damned hurry. He tries to slap some colour into his cheeks, but yep, still no blood, still no blush. It just makes his tremors worse. Shit.

He doesn’t know what time it was, but apparently it is early enough for the corridors to be thankfully deserted. He makes good progress by half stumbling down the hall, one arm braced against the wall to prevent him from tripping over his own feet.

“Hey.”

Shit. He doesn’t turn, only hope that the voice and accompanied heavy footfalls weren’t directed at him.

“Hey. You.” Newt carries on, lifting himself a little taller and slowing down so he doesn’t exert himself. “Oi. Rotter.”

Shit. Shit. Shit. He bites his lip and tries not to collapse on the spot. He dreged some energy from some reserve and turns with a smile. “I’m sorry, were you talking to me?”

The Ranger- he must be a Ranger, he’s built like a brick shithouse and sports a jazzy buzzcut- growls at him as if he were mimicking the dog at his feet. “Identify yourself.”

Newt contains his rolled eyes, tries to keep his breaths regular and unsuspecting. “My name is Doctor Newton Geiszler, Head of K-Science, I’m a fully compliant PDS sufferer, I have been administered Neurotriptyline in the last 24 hours and will not enter a rabid state.” He tries to lock eyes with the Ranger, but there’s that look in the man’s eyes, one that means he doesn’t need much of an excuse to kill Newt on the spot.

“You don’t look compliant to me, mate.” The Ranger is moving his hand to his belt, where, yup, there’s a gun ripe to shoot him. “You taken Blue Oblivion?”

“Look, mate, I’m heading to medical on serious business. Serious, extremely rushed, business, and I would appreciate it if you could let me be on my way.”

The Ranger rolls his shoulders and Newt’s made a mistake, he knows he’s made a mistake, this kid is not Hermann, who will only verbally abuse him, nor is he like Stacker, who at least knows how valuable Newt is alive. “A rotter’s a rotter, drugs or no drugs,” he says. This Ranger is young, cocky, and shouting ‘stereotypical jock bully’ through every pore of his body.

That is, until, the Ranger goes very still, and a couple of seconds later, something drips to Newt’s feet. Newt stares at the stain on the ground, then brings a finger to his nose. Nothing? His finger travels further up until it meets the corner of his eye. It comes away covered in black liquid.

He stares at it in abject horror until there’s something pulling at his shoulder and a familiar voice at his ear- “-Jove, Dr. Geiszler, I’ve been looking for you everywhere, the patient is waiting, did we not tell you to meet us at Medical at seven?!” Newt is pulled into the embrace of the other man’s already moving body, letting himself be dragged down the hall. “Seven, Dr. Geiszler, do you understand the concept of time?!” Newt risks a glance up, and Hermann looks absolutely terrified, but is facing resolutely forwards, and steering him away from the Ranger, and from the gun, and Newt cannot find it in himself to ask how he’d been saved.

“Oi!” Newt’s whole body winces. “Oi, you two.” The Ranger’s stunned silence hadn’t taken long to wear off.

Newt can see Hermann grit his teeth as he stops and faces the Ranger. “As you well know, Ranger Hansen, I am Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, co-head of K-Science, I am a fully compliant PDS sufferer, I have been administered Neurotriptyline within the last twelve hours and I will not enter a rabid state. Now if you will excuse us,” he scowls, “Dr. Geiszler and I are scheduled for an extremely important appointment.”

The name Hansen rings a bell in Newt’s mind, but face and name don’t match… he’d thought Hansen was older? At least twice this twat’s age- but then wasn’t the older Hansen supposed to have a dickweed son?  He’s dragged away before he gets the answer, and he doesn’t quite care.

“You,” Hermann is whispering in a thin voice, “are impossible.” He’s holding out a handkerchief for Newt to take and so he does, pressing it to his eye and staining the spotless white black within seconds.

“This isn’t normal,” Newt clarifies, just in case. He’s kind of panicking, if he’s honest.

“I should hope not.”

“This has never happened before,” Newt tries again.

“And why do you think that is,” Hermann says, scolding. “Because you haven’t been treated in three days, minimum? Because you haven’t rested your body in more than eighty hours?”

“I’m not- I don’t feel like i’m going rabid,” Newt all but pleads as they reach the med room doors.

“No-one said you were.” Hermann holds his forearm, as if he’s afraid Newt will run away if he lets go.

“How did you know I-”

“Newton, will you shut up and get yourself dosed.” Hermann looks like he’s shaking too, but his looks more angry than Newt assumes his looks dangerously ill.

“Yeah. Yeah… yeah. Thanks.” He lifts his apprehended arm slightly, and Hermann drops it.  Newt wants to ask Hermann to stay, to look after him, to tell him that this black eyebleed is perfectly fine, that the trembles are normal, but Hermann stalks back down the hall before Newt can even open his mouth. “...yeah.” Newt says to himself. How could he expect Hermann to care about him now? He wipes away the remnants of the blood, making sure it’s stopped gushing, before pocketing the material and pushing his way into the room.

“I’m here for a late dosage?”

The secretary lifts a pointed eyebrow and looks less than amused at his state. “How late?”

“Uh- I slept through yesterday’s?”

“I’ll bet,” she says, but doesn’t mention anything else, just directs him to a small room, and tells him to wait until someone comes for him.

He waits for nearly forty minutes before a small, too-cheery woman appears in the doorway, needle already out. “Any additional symptoms?” She asks, already behind him and pulling down the back of his collar.

“Uh- ...no.”

“‘Uh no’, or ‘no’?”

“No,” Newt says, glad that his jeans are black and the blood will not show up through them.

“Right. Here we go, little shock, as ever.” There’s the invasive sensation down his spine and he recoils with the burn of pain, his dead cells falsely stimulated, his muscles tensing and releasing, his brain trying to test his nerves with shots of pain- “All dosed and ready. Don’t sleep through the next one,” she says with a wink, and she’s out of the room like a blue-clad hurricane.

Newt shivers, a sob escaping him before he can catch it.

Hold it together, Geiszler, he tells himself.

At least the tremors have stopped. 


	6. 2024

2024

Four years after the rising, three years since he’d been contacted by a man claiming to be a prophet, and one since he’d started to bleed out of his eyes, Newt is sent an email.

His and Hermann’s working relationship hadn’t changed much in the last year or so from its largely quiet, sometimes argumentative nature, but beyond the lab doors, they’d barely seen one another. Or- rather- Newt had never seen Hermann. After a couple of weeks, he realised that it was intentional, and that was fine, right? Wasn’t that what he’d been trying to do? So he accepted it and moved on, insomuch as he thought about it pretty much constantly and tried not to, instead pushing it back to hide behind the thoughts of dealing with emails like the one he’d just been sent.

Terrorism.

The word made him feel paler, as if his stomach had dropped to the floor.

‘We would like you to cause one of the Jaegers to malfunction during a mission. It will show the world how strong our hand of Justice is, how strong our fist strikes.’

Newt shivers and his first instinct is to just delete it, to delete everything, to be rid of the strange person on the other end of the internet, who’d coerced him into creating the website, into reading out a script for the camera, into organising a following. Newt was angry about the injustice he and his fellow PDS sufferers felt but- this wasn’t just giving the leader a recipe for a more effective Neurotriptyline, or distilling it into a harsher, purer form that became what was known as Blue Oblivion, this was- this was terrorism. This would get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of civilians killed. The Kaiju were getting stronger and more frequent by the month, and this kind of activity was just… unexcusable.

‘That would be murder,” he types back.

‘They’ve murdered countless of our brethren.’ is the almost immediate reply.

‘That doesn’t mean you can just take out a Jaeger. The Kaiju aren’t something you can underestimate.’ Newt doesn’t get a reply for another half hour, which he doesn’t quite know what to make of. He’s never rejected a request before, and he’s never been kept waiting before. He wonders if there are other members within the Shatterdome with orders to kill him waiting on their laptops.

He sits at his desk, clicking refresh every minute until he gets a new email.

‘Find the First Risen.’

Newt just kinda wants a hug.

 

* * *

 

Hermann glances over at Newton for the umpteenth time that day, and for a similar amount of time, what he glances at is exactly the same: Newton is sitting in his chair, head back, staring at the ceiling. Hermann can see that he’s blinking, at least, so he’s sentient, but Newton has been sitting like that for hours now, and he’s not… said anything. It makes it rather hard to be angry when the object of one’s anger is in a near-vegetative state. He doesn’t look rabid, though, so that’s…. that.

Hermann clears his throat, which seems to do something to Newton’s features, if only fractionally. “By the way,” he starts, and he is awarded the tiniest of a tilt of the head in his direction. “They seem to be making a list of non-complaints.”

Newton blinks once, long and slow, before it looks like he’s pulled himself together. His spine straightens and he rolls his shoulders. “Oh.”

“So you may want to tell your followers,” Hermann says quickly, in one breath, so as to not hesitate from saying it. He taps his piece of chalk on the board and writes a random string of numbers so it looks like he’s nonchalant about the whole affair.

“My followers?” Newton blinks again, then his brow pinches. “What followers?”

“All these brain-washed people everywhere. Who have started to arrive at their stations without their cover-up on.”

“I don’t- what are you talking about?”

Hermann shoots him a look because he cannot say it. How can he say he had been given the url of a website one lunchtime by a Ranger with haunted eyes, that he had recognised the chinks in the wall of Newton’s bunk, that he had found the vials of homebrewed Neurotriptyline and Oblivion, ‘hidden’ so well in the top drawer of Newton’s desk, that he had used Tendo’s camera systems to observe Newton’s suspicious activities these last years, when saying that would make it more real than it was?

“Warn them that non-compliance will not get them anywhere but the crematorium. Tell them that this behaviour cannot be stood for in Shatterdomes or, in fact, in any military establishment.”

“Why? Because now they have something to believe in?”

The chalk falls from Hermann’s grip and he abandons it to the floor, instead storming to Newton’s side so that the risk of being overheard is not so significant. “What, as the Beuna Kai believe the Kaiju are our true gods? Newton, you are claiming to be a Prophet.”

“Noo, no, no, you’ve got that wrong, I’m no prophet. I’m just doing what I’ve been told. They stuck the ‘disciple’ name on me but I’m just- i’m doing it because we need our freedom, Herms.”

“Newton this is ridiculous, we’re perfectly fine as we are,” Hermann says, softening his voice slightly and imploring as much as he can. “We have jobs, we have lives.”

Newton stands at this, taking off his glasses and throwing them on his desk with a clatter. “Looks to me like you’re the one who’s brainwashed, just over a longer period.”

Hermann barks a harsh sound, half-laugh, half-incredulity. He rubs tiredly at his eyes, feeling the fight leached from him. “Do you realise just how great you could be if you could be normal for just- for just two seconds of your life?”

“Great? Great? Hermann I am ‘great’, I am the dictionary definition of great! I am an important or distinguished person, specifically academically blessed!”

“You know that’s not what I mean!” Hermann snaps. Newton doesn’t show any recognition as to what he’s referring to and Hermann bites his lip. “Newton, I have implied on multiple occasions that I would like to be romantically engaged with you.”

Newton pauses to create a pregnant silence as they stare at one another, reflexively panting as if exhausted from the argument. “Oh.”

“‘Oh’ indeed. But do not worry, after this conversation I feel more and more inclined to give up on the sentiment.”

“Herms-” Without breaking eye contact, one of Newton’s hands reaches out to touch the material of Hermann’s jumper, finger splaying slightly on his chest. “What do normal people do?” he asks quietly.

Hermann stares at the arm bridging them and yearns, yearns for the touch, even if he cannot feel it, even if it won’t be warm, but there’s a fire in Newton’s eyes that isn’t passion and he takes a step back. “Stop it.”

“What? What am I doing?”

“Whatever conversion technique you are attempting to use, I shall not stand for your… for your extremist organisation.”

“I’m not doing anything to you, Herms.”

“Hah!”

“I'm serious!” Newton says, hand reaching out again.  “I'm serious. Tell me what you want, tell me how I can be normal. I'll do anything I can to give it to you.”

“Oi you two, I just saw Stacker heading this way, thought i’d warn you to get yourselves presentable… aaaand i’ve walked in on something big, haven’t I.”

Hermann’s head cracks towards the voice as Tendo walks in and Newt’s hand retracts, quicker than lightning. Both return to their halves of the room, neither acknowledging Tendo further.

“Okay well I’ll take that as a yes. Sorry for disturbing you. Stacker is coming. You know where to find me for angsty rants. Tendo out.”

 

* * *

 

Hermann is woken up by four rapid raps on his door in a too-suspiciously Doctor Who-esque manner to be but a handful of his associates. He had been lying on his bed, resting his dry eyes and weak hip, and though he hadn’t been sleeping, he feels groggy as he stands to open the door.

“Newton?” he starts, because he hasn’t seen this man out of his labcoat and smiling- in the vaguest sense of the word but smiling all the same- since- since a forever ago. “What- is- is something wrong?” Surely Hermann can’t have slept through the Kaiju alarm? Had someone died? Had an experiment gone wrong? A new calculation unraveled?

“Hey, Herms.” Newton squirms on the spot as if he’s a child send to the headmaster’s office and keeps fidgeting- fidgeting, Newton is fidgeting again- “I was uh- I was wondering if you wanted to go for dinner or something?”

“Newton- I- you realise it’s approximately half three in the morning?”

Newton winces in a way that probably means no, he didn’t realise. “Yeah, well, we’ll beat the morning rush.”

“...and you know we cannot consume digestible goods?”

“Yes, Herms, I know we can’t eat, god, i’m not five.”

Hermann squints at him and he looks like Newton, he looks like the man he’d met seven years ago, the utterly inconceivable, stupidly intelligent man encased in a five year old’s personality. The man he’d been in life, not the one from mere hours ago. Hermann nods, slowly at first, then quicker, as if Newton will change his mind given the chance, because Hermann’s been so distant these few years, but-

“If you could be so kind as to hold the door-” Hermann lets Newton hold open the thick metal as he grabs his coat and stuffs his wallet in his trouser pockets. “What?”

“Really? You’re wearing that coat?” Newton moves out of the way as Hermann locks his door on his way out. “No, scratch that, you’re wearing a coat?”

Hermann sighs, feigning long-suffering to hide a nostalgic smile. “We can hardly pretend to fit in if we waltz around outside in t-shirts, now can we, Newton.”

“I don’t actually think you own t-shirts, so I call your bluff.”

“That was hardly a bluff.” Hermann raises an eyebrow. “It may have been an exaggeration…”

Newton snorts, jamming his hands in his trouser pockets as they start to walk. “Do you ever actually leave your room with less than three layers? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in less than three layers.”

“You have a very selective memory, in that case.” Hermann glanced at Newton and makes a conscious decision not to dig any further. He recognises the look of remembrance at their having to wear the hospital-gown like clothes during their internment at the Facility. “I seem to remember sending you that photograph of myself at the beach in Camber Sands.”

“Dude, that photo was of when you were like seven. That doesn’t count.”

“I think you’ll find it adequate in proving that I have owned at least one t-shirt in my life.”

“Okay so the parameters of that phrase were off. I don’t think you have ever actively gone out and bought a t-shirt to wear for ‘recreational use’.”

“Well, if we’re being like that, I don’t think you own a practical set of clothing for any occasion other than to look like you’re still wearing your school uniform.”  

“School uniform?” Newton splutters, managing to sound the most offended he’s ever sounded. “School uniform? You think my look is ‘school uniform’?!”

“Yes well, white shirt, black trousers, shoddily tied black tie, is that not what you wore in ‘High School’?”

“No, Hermann, I didn’t, because I didn’t go to high school, I was kinda busy with all those doctorates-”

“Ahh, I see, so it is merely an attempt to create the illusion of the high school student you were never allowed to be.”

“First off, teasing me about not getting to have a high-school experience is below the belt, second, even if I hadn’t skipped it, I would have worn normal clothes since I was educated in a place that isn’t the setting of a BBC drama, and third, I can’t believe you’re making fun of me for wearing smart-casual in the workplace??”

“I am honestly concerned you referred to the Queen’s country as the setting of a ‘BBC drama’.”

“You literally just called it ‘Queen’s country’ in all seriousness didn’t you oh my god.”

“The United Kingdom isn’t just some constant long-shot of central London, you do know this, right?”

“You do know that not every person raised in the US is a complete idiot, right?”

“Ich kann nicht glauben, dass wir über dieses Argument.”

“Hermann, did you just switch languages to completely deny how much of a Britophile you were being because I think you did.”

“Vielleicht fühlte ich mich wie zu sprechen in unserem Muttersprache?”

“Yeah, or maybe you’re using German because you know I can’t speak it that well and maybe I only recognised the words ‘speak’ and ‘mother-tongue’.”

“Wer ist der intelligente man jetzt?”

Newton squints at him and his mouth moves as if he’s repeating what Hermann had just said. “Did you just say ‘who’s the clever one now’? Oh my god Herms you’re such a child.”

Hermann feels like he’s glowing slightly. “Now you know how I feel.”

“That’s it, i’m hallucinating. A figment of my imagination masquerading as Hermann just taunted me with ‘Now you know how I feel’ yup I died in my sleep, this isn’t real.”

“Would you like me to pinch you?”

“Oh yeah, pinch the zombie, that’ll make him affirm whether or not he’s dreaming.”

Hermann laughs from his heart for the first time in post-living memory. He didn’t understand the stigma of using the ‘z-word’. He was a nerd who’d died in a massive monster attack and then had risen as the fucking undead during an apocalypse, and he’d eaten brains, he’d eaten an actual human’s brains, he was a zombie, he might be high-functioning but he was a zombie and it was nearly 4am and he was in a dark street with his friend, his friend who was joking with him and he deserved to laugh.

He stops in the middle of the street and covers his eyes with one hand and laughs, and he can hear Newton laughing at him, or with him, or just laughing and they were laughing together.

 

* * *

 

“I’m working on a cure.” Newt says after they’ve been seated and had had their orders taken. He rips open a packet of sugar and pours it on the desk, playing with the grains on the table. Hermann gives him a disapproving look, but it doesn’t last long as curiosity takes hold of his features.

“A cure?”

Newt nods. “A cure,” he repeats.

Hermann leans in slightly, his voice hushing despite them being the only customers in the place. “Not a stronger dosage of Neurotriptyline, but an actual cure?”

Newt nods again, pushing the grains around with one finger to form patterns like the bonds he’d been working on in the lab. “You’re laughing less than I imagined.”

“This is hardly a laughing matter, Newton. And if anyone could do it, I wouldn’t doubt it would be you. Where do you currently stand in your research?” Newt can see Hermann is watching his hands as he makes formula after formula on the table. He can also feel the tremors start to set in. So he wipes the sugar off the desk and jams his hands in his trousers.

“Did you know that Stacker’s been making me experiment drift compatibility on PDS sufferers?”

“I’d heard that you’d refused to work on non-compliants,” Hermann huffs, face going grim. “What changed?”

“My rules on who could apply to the testing. Only people who could sign their name after reading the whole contract.”

“And have you managed?” Hermann’s own hands are placed one on top of each other on the table, as if he’ll forget where they are if they’re not in his sight. “To get two sufferers to enter neural handshake with one another?” he clarifies, as if Newt needs it.

Newt stares at Hermann’s hands, not seeing them but the compound after compound, line after line of data he’s read in the last hours, days, months, years-“I know i’m close, I can feel it…”

“And what happens to the sufferers who do not manage to tolerate the neural load?” Hermann doesn’t pose the question as much of a question, more of a statement that needs acquiescing, so Newt does just that in his silence. “Right.” Hermann’s pointer finger starts to tap, whether impatience, frustration or displeasure is fuelling it, Newt can’t tell. “And the cure? Will it be a purely physical treatment?”

Newt shakes his head. “No, no, I’m working on a… a hormone mix. Chemical shock to the system plus neurological kick is my working theory.”

“Your salad of the day, side of toast, and two coffees, Sirs.” The two look up as the lady serving them returns with their order.

Newt smiles at her, not envying her shift time. Though, from the way-too familiar eye-colour, Newt has his suspicions about whether this particular worker minds not having to sleep. “Uh- thanks- sorry, have you got a box for these? We forgot we had to be somewhere…”

“No problem, hun. I’ll be right back with that for you.” The lady returns quickly and they package up their food, pay their bill (and tip generously) without any holdup. Then they’re out on the street again and Newt takes the lead, taking them down to the synthetic gardens-come-forest-come-pond area.

“I thought we could use it to feed the ducks,” he says, starting to break apart the bread in its box and chucking a couple of pieces at the non-existent animals. Hopefully, they were sleeping, though Newt knew nothing about bird sleep-patterns. “And rabbits? Can we get a rabbit for the lab? Like pretend we need to do experiments on it but really just feed it our salad of the day and leftover duck-food. Do rabbits eat bread? Can rabbits eat bread? No, I don’t think they can, can they, no, they like it, they can’t digest it, yeah that was right.”

Hermann raises an eyebrow at him, folding his arms across his chest. “You are the least terrifying terrorist member I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

“You’ve met others? Oh god please refer them to me, I need some serious advice right now.”

Hermann looks like he’s just had a static shock, but humours him anyway with a small “Oh?”

“Yeah, I mean,” Newt knew this was a bad idea, but hey, what else had he to lose nowadays anyway. “Say if your anonymous and frankly terrifying leader were to send you a message saying to sabotage something like, oh, I don’t know, the Jaeger program? But then you were like ‘uhm no, thank you, that’s a bad idea’ and then they come back to you with a really vague ‘find the first risen’ how would you go about doing any of that?” Newt continues to tear at the toast, the crumbs getting smaller and smaller. “Would you be worried that because you didn’t do the task, someone else will? And who actually is the first risen, and what am I supposed to do with them and how do you even tell like there’re millions of people out there, who’s going to remember rising before anyone else?”

“...Would it be… odd to remember rising alone?”

“Far as I can tell from all the guys i’ve been talking to, we all remember joining others, or at least there being two or three rising at a time. Never an isolated incident.”

“...oh. I had never thought it… strange. To have risen before my comrades, as it were.”

“That’s not the point Herms, you’re getting sidetracked, the point is, is that the ULA might be trying to organise the complete shutdown of Shatter…” as Newt’s mind caught up with his mouth, he stopped in his tracks. “...you rose… alone?”

Hermann nods, frowning.

“...But in… America, right? So two days after Europe?”

Hermann shakes his head, his features contorting. “I was buried in the UK. In the North.”

“...Where the first accounts of the Risen started…” Newt takes a second to let this all compute before he lets out a laugh. “I can’t believe it. I found the First Risen.”

“Newton. We cannot be sure, you cannot let crazy ideas such as this one contort your vision…”

Newt makes a ‘psh’ sound, and Hermann steps back. “Hermann Gottlieb, angry maths extraordinaire, First Risen. I think it has a ring to it, don’t- what? What’s with the face? Was it something I said?”

Hermann’s deer-in-the-headlights transforms into his usual defensive anger, body tensing. “You don’t think, Geiszler, that perhaps a member of the ULA who had just voiced his concerns at what he would do once he had located the First Risen poses a threat, any threat at all, to someone who has just discovered he may in fact be former man’s target?”

“Dude- Herms- Hermann, no, dude, I’m not going to grass you up, I’m not going to turn you in for my homework-” Hands taken up by the two boxes, he mentally gestures, in a way that will hopefully convey his feelings.

Hermann grimaces, his hand rubbing his injured hip as if he thought he could feel it. “How can you expect me to trust you, Geiszler.”

“Oh my god, Herms, can you hear yourself right now?” He waves the boxes slightly, limited in gesture ability. “You sound like a romance-without-a-capital-R protagonist, and nobody wants that.”

“Well I’m glad this amuses one of us.”

“Hermann! I’m serious! ULA directives and scary Prophets be damned: they’re not prying you out of my literal cold, dead fingers for the world. First Risen or otherwise.”

Between scowls, Hermann looks like he wants to believe Newt, but that hope is slowly fading. “Words are cheap, Geiszler. I find I cannot trust your promises quite so wholeheartedly anymore.” Hermann brushes past him, stalking back towards the Shatterdome.

“Herms! Dude! Agh-” Newt practically barrels into Hermann’s side in an attempt to get him to stop, half-jogging to match Hermann’s uneven but long strides. “Just getting this out there, I really want to kiss you right now.”   

“Excuse me?”

“I want to kiss you and hug you and like touch you- touch you touch you but not like down there-touch you in a that-was-an-innuendo-euphemism-thing way but still touch- hug- kiss you. AHAHAH okay forget I ever said anything, okay start over.” Newt takes a deep breath and curses inwardly about having to be holding toast and dank lettuce instead of just jumping the man. “You’re magnificent and I’m terrified of you and how amazing you are and I’ve been pretty desperately trying to tell you I really like you an obscene amount too.”

 

* * *

 

When they sneak back in, Mako is waiting for them in the lab, and any elation they had been feeling is wiped off of their faces. “I would like to help you,” she says, arms crossed and looking determined.

They had heard of Ms. Mori’s antics across the years, from her advocation of PDS rights to her almost vigilante-like protection of bullied sufferers, but neither had had the fortune to have met her in the flesh before.

“With what?” Newt asks, trying to look fifty shades less guilty for fifty different crimes. He can hear his voice reaching peak height, which definitely didn’t make him sound any more innocent.

“With your drift experiments.” She pronounces the words carefully so as to not trip over them. The harsh lighting of the room makes her cheekbones look sharper, her eyes more hawkish, and definitely unlike the forever-seventeen year old girl they had arrived with.

Newt sucks his teeth and shrugs. “Sorry, Maks, I’ve got about seven hundred pieces of paper from the Marshall telling me to never let you anywhere near the machine, and another thousand telling me very specifically not to turn it on once you do sneak in here.” He can see Hermann trying to look very uninvolved next to him, which needs to change. “Tell her Herms,” he says, elbowing the man, which gets him a look of astonished indignity.

“I- Uhm-” Newt tries to send him telepathic messages somewhere along the lines of ‘do it for love’, and apparently this works because Hermann is quick to recover himself. “Yes, I do seem to remember having to file that paperwork for you, Dr. Geiszler. Marshall Pentecost seemed rather adamant you were to not help with the doctor’s experiments.”

Mako looks between the two, her face a series of suspicious glances. “You two never agree with one another if you can help it,” she states plainly.

“That’s because-” Newt’s confession of love is cut off as Hermann coughs rudely and loudly over the top of him.

“Yes, well, it would be rather unfortunate to lose a skilled a pilot as you are so early into the battle, Miss Mori. I am quite sure the Marshall is of similar mindset.”

Mako’s determination doesn’t seem to falter, but her voice softens a shade. “I would just like to help you, Dr. Geiszler. I know I am stronger than those you have been using previously.”

Newt squirms because it’s true, and as a scientist, he really is a sucker for the truth. He’d also like to experiment on something- someone that might fight back against the neural load. But disobeying Pentecost, killing Mako, that was too much for him to handle.

Newt startles as a hand claps on his shoulder. “Do you have forms preventing me from participating?” a heavy voice asks from behind the scientists.

“Mr. Hansen?” Hermann is the first to respond, and yeah, this is the Hansen Newt recognises as daddy Hansen, as Herculean in stature as his name implies.  

“I don’t- I mean, I don’t think- ….huh.” Newt thinks about it, but PDS-wise, Herc is possibly the highest in the Shatterdome, and even the living respect him with similar reverence to the Marshall.

“If I can be of service to you men, there’ll be less fault shared if this old man cocks it up.”

“But Sir- your experience is vital to the war effort,” Mako says, stepping forwards. “I am only a new recruit, I am not worth sacrificing yourself over.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to sacrifice,” Newt says, not really wanting to think about the repercussions of killing off on of the more high-ranking officers in the place.

“Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann says, “surely you cannot actually be considering this?”

Newt turns to fully lock eyes with Hermann. “I’ve got to try something. I told you. It’s this or-” his shoulders relax, egging himself on. “It’s this, this is the answer.” He glances at Mako behind Hermann, and Herc behind himself, who both decide the far wall is incredibly interesting and avert their eyes and attention.

“For Tendo, for humanity, for-” he takes his hands out of his jean pockets and they’re as bad as they get. He can barely clench his fingers into shivering fists. Hermann’s downtrodden eyes and taught mouth are not so much shocked as… as if his suspicions have been confirmed.

“Will you stop being quite so dramatic, you ponce. ‘For humanity’. How laughable your ego is.”

“Don’t you know it,” Newt laughs, small grin creeping onto his face in an attempt to elicit the same response from Hermann.

Herc coughs into his fist. “If we’re interrupting something,” he says, hiding his entertainment behind performed sternness.

Mako is less intent on hiding her amusement. “Yes! Get a room, boys!”

“Oh my god, Herc I could almost expect this from with your Aussie-ness but Mako! I’m disappointed in you.” Newt winks at Hermann before going to attack Mako with an elbow, pulling fake punches and shouting “Putt’em up! You wanna go? You so wanna go don’t you, I could take you, come at me, bro!”

“This is the man who claims to know how to save humanity,” Newt hears Hermann say over Mako’s return jabs. “Typical. Back to his child-form just when the going’s about to get tough.”

 

* * *

 

After a couple of weeks, the jovial congregation isn’t quite so positive. Mako had spend most of her days out of training helping Newton set up his experiments, but when she realised her presence was more needed elsewhere in the Shatterdome, she stopped attending the tests.

Newt had been upbeat about having a strong contender for success, until it kept going wrong.

Herc had started off strong, but the constant battle was exhausting him to the point where near-misses were too frequent for comfort.

Hermann had been pressed for a while trying to configure a rig that could support various quantities of human:AI, but recently had to up the AI until having a human passenger was almost unnecessary.

The four of them had started their private mission with enthusiasm, but with pilots dying off more often, it was getting harder to ignore the consequences of their failure.

“Mr. Hansen  is late,” Hermann sniffs, pocketing his glasses and looking up from his monitor. He swipes at the holographic numbers, arranging them into a neater arrangement.

“Chill, it’s been like ten minutes. I’m sure he’s got serious Ranger-y things to be doing. Like lifting things. Or pushing things. Or…. what do Rangers do, again?”

“More than you rotters, that’s for damned sure.” Newt and Hermann sit up straight in their seats at the voice, Australian but belonging to the wrong Hansen.

“My name is Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, co-head of K-Science, I am a fully compliant PDS sufferer-” Hermann starts out of habit. Chuck has a nasty habit of fiddling with his weapons whenever he is in the vicinity, and it didn’t especially inspire awe so much as the fear of god in most PDS.

“Don’t,” comes a softer voice, older and tired. “I apologise for my kid’s shitty behaviour. Don’t feel like you have to identify yourself for the brat.”

The two relax as Herc pushes past his son, his glare putting the younger man in his resigned place. “I have a suggestion for you doctors.”

Newt doesn’t usually like non-PHD-holders giving him suggestions, but he’s all out of his own, and by this point, he’ll pretty much try anything. “I’m ears?”

“You keep trying with just a single pilot, and i’ll be honest, it’s gruelling. Us pilots, we’re meant to drift together, that’s what we do.” Herc crosses his arms and gives a sharp nod at his son. “We haven’t drifted since my death. You think it could work?”

“But he’s-”

“Not a rotter like you,” Chuck spits. “You’re damned right I’m not.” He turns to leave in a huff, but Herc grabs his arm, pulling him back.

“Christ, will you act your age? This is about more than you,” he growls, holding his son in place. “You’re a Ranger for god’s sake, why don’t you act like it.”

Chuck goes white, then red, then bites his tongue, jaw gritting. He doesn’t say anything, but he pulls away from his father’s grip and stands on the spot, showing his obedience.

Newt and Hermann share a look that spins through ‘why didn’t we think of it before’, ‘it was so obvious’, ‘will it really be possible’, and all the way through to ‘what horrors will the kid have to suffer through in his dad’s mind’.

“If you’re sure?” Newt says. “I mean I’m not exactly your son’s number one fan, but… you didn’t exactly… have a pleasant passing.”

“Chuck may be a dick, but he’s my son. I know what he can handle.”

Newt looks between the father and son, then for possibly the first time in his life, looks to another person for their advice in his work. Hermann lowers his eyes, avoiding the responsibility for a couple of seconds, but then looks back up with renewed vigour. “It could work,” Hermann agrees.

“Then let’s try.”


	7. The Present

2025

“It was the recently decommissioned Jaeger, Striker Eureka, piloted by Herc and Chuck Hansen that finally brought the Kaiju down…”

“Me and the old man are pioneers of the PDS-Human neural link, and we’re stronger than ever. They decomissioned the Jaeger program because of mediocre pilots, it’s that simple. That’s Striker Eureka’s tenth kill to date, it’s a new record, living or dead.”

* * *

2025

Stacker’s helicopter touches down in the blustering snowstorm and he steps out to the crowd of stoney-face workers. They want to know why an official is here, grease-covered faces criticising him from underneath hardhats. The man he’d wanted to see comes to greet him. The man’s face is a deep, reddish orange, from the cold, from the dirt, all mixed in with his bright mousse. He nods at Stacker, squaring his shoulders.

“Mr. Becket.”

“Marshall. Looking sharp.”

“Long time.”

Stacker hadn’t seen the man after the rising, but had been told that he’d arrived at one of the PDS recruitment drives, asking whether a ‘Yancy’ had been found. When their records had turned up null, Raleigh had volunteered for the only other PDS job hiring: working the Wall of Life. “5 years, 4 months.”

“Can I have a word?”

Becket’s jaw sets but he leads Stacker into the building, sitting down beneath showers of welding sparks and metalwork. “Step into my office.”

“Took me a while to find you- Anchorage, Sheldon Point-”

“Yeah well, a man in my position, travels with the wall, chasing shifts that actually make a living with this ‘Give Back Scheme’ crap…” Becket picks wryly at his orange vest, the letters proclaiming his status as a sufferer faded from years of work. “What do you want?”

“Spent the last six months activating anything I can get my hands on. There’s an old Jaeger. Mark III. You know it. Needs a pilot.” He smiles. Competition between PDS Rangers has been hotting up, with too few actual piloting jobs and too many that involved cleaning up, removing dead bodies, hoisting away debris. He needed pilots who weren’t rookies to balance out the battle.

“I’m guessing I wasn’t your first choice.”

“You were my first choice. All the other Mark III pilots are still dead.”

Becket flinches, looks down at his hands. “Look. I can’t have anyone else in my head again. I’m done. I was still connected to my brother when he died, and he hasn’t risen since. I can’t go through that again, man, I’m sorry.” He pushes past Stacker and Stacker winces.

“Haven’t you heard, Mr. Becket?” Becket stalls, turns around. “The world has come to an end. So where would you rather live your afterlife? Here?” Stacker knows he’s won when Becket lowers his eyes in shame, then opens them with conviction.  “Or in a Jaeger.”

* * *

2025

Mako waits for the Marshall and the Ranger in the rain under her umbrella, watching the younger man get out with an assessing eye. She is impressed by how well Raleigh applies his cover-up Mousse. She has met many men who apply theirs with sponges, especially at the Shatterdome, because they think that to apply it nicely would be too feminine.

She is confused by these men. They would prefer to look like characters out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with their bright orange faces. This is especially true of the Western men, or the men trying to appear as such. Those born in Hong Kong or Japan have lighter shades of Mousse and so their hamfistedness does not show up so strong.

This man, Mr. Becket, is soft in the eyes, and does not walk with either the sorrow of a PDS sufferer, or the cockish stride of the living men. He looks so alive, but for the dull blue of his contact-lens coloured eyes. She makes a mental reminder to herself to ask him how he applies it, whether he learnt new ways on the Wall, surrounded by well-travelled sufferers.

“Mr. Becket,” the Marshall introduces, “This is Mako Mori, one of our brightest. Also in charge of the Mark III restoration program. She personally handpicked your co-pilot candidates.”

“イメージと違う。” She is aware she sounds like a petulant teenager, analysing a boy for his looks, by his soft hair, the crinkle at the edge of his eyes, but from all of the legends, he looks neither the coward who ran from duty, nor the hero who’d managed to pilot single-handedly. A small smile has crept onto the Marshall’s face, as if he thought  the same of Becket’s ‘image’.

Mr. Becket’s unexpected understanding in his smile ruffles her. “違うって？”  His heavily accented Japanese, challenging her to distinguish her comment as either an insult or a compliment, makes her feel like if it could leap, her heart rate would have doubled. He has the lilt of a Western businessman, someone who’d only learnt the language from trips to bars with colleagues. She wonders if he had worked on the Wall in Japan for a while.

“失礼しまして” She apologises, now feeling the seventeen years that she remains, a child in front of this adult. “ あなたの話よく聞てな物ですから” Although the Marshall had not joined in with the speculation and rumours addressing Mr. Becket’s life-after-death, as quite a few techs had in the last few months at the Shatterdome’s PDS break room, he had informed them of various acts of honourable mention he had performed in his brief stint as a pilot. He was a true talking-point of the base.

Mr. Becket’s lips twitch into a kinder smile at her statement and he nods in more formal greeting, which she returns with a mirrored expression. The Marshall seems glad that they’ve bonded, and directs them inside. “We’ll tour the facility first, then Ms. Mori will show you to your Jaeger, Mr. Becket.”

She thinks that she might like this man.

* * *

2025

“Stop pulling your blows!” Raleigh shouts as another of his hits lands on her ride side, hard enough to have bruised, had she had blood enough to bleed. He hadn’t expected her to be so slow in pulling away from him, and his staff had force enough to make her stagger a few steps back. “Again, Mako! You need to use your staff more in blocking your right!”

She makes an aggravated huffing sound, spinning the staff in her hands before resetting into the starting position. There are a couple more clacks from where wood meets wood before she stops short again and Raleigh pounds another blow into the same spot.

He frowns at her. Before he had noticed her weakness in this one position, they had been fighting evenly. Now, with this one attack, he had boosted his winnings until he had won ten matches to her five. “What?” He asks her, stepping off the mat in order to return the staff to its rack. “You ill?”

Mako winces, gripping her own weapon harder, unwilling to relinquish it. She shakes her head and Raleigh sighs.

“Then what? C’mon Mako, I know you’re better than this.”

When she doesn’t raise her eyes from the floor and her expression clouds into vexation, Raleigh steps back onto the mat. “I’m not angry, I’m not telling you off,” he chances, softening his voice. “I just want to know how to help.”

Mako’s shoulders are tense, and she looks ready to throw the staff to the ground, but instead she passes it to him and turns around. Raleigh starts as she hefts the back of her shirt up with one hand, revealing a long, deep black wound that punctures the woman back through front. It has been crudely stitched with black, rope-like thread, as if that could keep the innards in, the skin ridged and black where the needle has punctured her.  It is slightly off kilter, the skin pulled more taut on her right side than her left.

“I cannot effectively defend my right side, because even we cannot function with puncture wounds that have severed erector spinæ muscles.”

Looking at the wound makes even Raleigh queasy, but he continues to do so with morbid curiosity. On her slightly blue-hued skin, the black of clotted blood is staggering. He had forgotten that not all of those who died in the war had died in their sleep, drowning in the icy black or with a clean shot through the heart.

“You’re incredible,” he says, breathy, because she is: who could have injuries like hers, have been killed and orphaned and alone like her and fight so on par with one without injuries, one with full physical health?

Mako takes a deep breath, then releases it all at once. “I cannot fight like this. I cannot be drift compatible with injuries like mine. It will hinder the cause.”

“Most people couldn’t,” he tells her slowly, painfully honest, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know whether, in a situation where physical health is so necessary, an injury so near the spine could jeapordise not only the Jaeger, but the pilots within it, and the people it would be protecting. Could he really reject the other candidates to accept Mako? He wanted to, he wanted to because he could feel their compatibility, their minds pinging off one another in close quarters, but...

“If you’ll excuse me,” she says, already readjusting her shirt and out of the door before he can pull himself out of his revelry.

* * *

2025

Newt was alone in the lab, which was never a good thing. Where Hermann was was a complete mystery, but at least it made what he was about to do easier.

Kind of.

“Kaiju-PDS drift experiment, take one.”

It was poetic, right? Setting up parallels? Leaving a second suicide note with his potential second death? Not having Hermann find out until posthumously? Poetic.

Or a completely, tremendously horrible idea, but Newt was going to go with poetic.

“The uh, the brain segment of the frontal lobe, chances are, the uhm, the segment is far too damaged to drift with- and so far, only uh- 1 living, one 1 PDS pilot teams have been successful.” Newt gulps, staring at the lump of flesh floating in its preserving fluid.

He had been a lump of monster flesh to be experimented upon not too long ago. He had been chained to an operation table and told nothing. He had been dissected, injected, poked, prodded, and used for humanity’s gain. He had been the first to react to the Neurotriptyline that had become the Partially Deceased’s cure.

That meant he was strong, right? It meant he was....

‘Important’, he can hear Hermann say, in a dark room after a panic attack.

No, no, it wasn’t the time to think about that, to think about Hermann, he had to think about the science. If anyone was qualified to drift with a Kaiju, it was a fellow misunderstood creature. It had to be Newt.

He hesitates over the button and thinks about Hermann. He pushes it.

* * *

2025

“I would like to request Miss Mori as my co-pilot.”

Stacker had seen this coming. He had felt it in the air between the two of them on that helipad, and he had witnessed it bloom in the days since then as they’d trained, and yet it still made his eyes harden involuntarily. “That’s not going to work.”  

Becket’s eyes have a shine to them that Stacker hasn’t seen in any pilot since before the rising. Before then, even. “Why not?”

“Because I said so, Mr. Becket.”

“But Sir, she is the strongest candidate by far-”

“Miss Mori is unreliable as a Jaeger pilot. Her injuries prevent her from necessary maneuvers.”

“With all due respect, Sir, Mako has shown herself to be the most reliable of any of the other candidates, injury or no.”

“I do not care for your opinion, Ranger. Miss Mori does not qualify as an eligible Pilot. I have made my decision, and it would be wise of you not to question it.”

“Sir- Just let us try, once, if she cannot handle herself then I accept your decision- what choice do we have, otherwise?”

Stacker’s lips purse. “You get one chance. Report to the Shatterdome in two hours.”

* * *

2025

“Setting harness to test mode, waiting for second pilot.”

As if responding to Raleigh’s voice, the speaker system calls out. “Two pilots on board.”

“I’m going to take this side if you don’t mind.” Raleigh grins at her as she approaches. “I’ve heard my pilot’s right side is shot.”

“Sure.” She grins back, and there’s mischievousness in it, one that can only come naturally when you feel like you belong. It makes Raleigh feel like he’s melting. “How do you do it?” she asks as they strap themselves in, and Raleigh hums inquisitively.

“How do I do what?”

“Your cover-up mousse. I cannot replicate the colour, no matter the technique I try.”

“That’s-” Raleigh pauses when Mako’s head cocks, listening. “...Nevermind. Five minutes, you’re gonna be inside my head. You’ll see.” They prepare for neural handshake.

* * *

2025

Hermann is livid as he stands behind Stacker and listens to Newton yipping about his drift, he had drifted with a Kaiju, his hands were trembling, his eyes were shot with black, the left starting to drip again, he looked wrecked, and the Marshal was convincing Newton to go to the Bone Slums?

Hermann would admit he had little knowledge of the Black Market, but this Hannibal Chau, he would surely realise that Newt was Partially Deceased, he might use this against Newton, Newton was a biologist, not a fighter, not a black market cartel, how was he supposed to convince a known criminal to give him his valuable wares-

And even if the bone slums were PDS ‘friendly’, even if they supported the ULA, was that not worse? Did that not mean Newt might find his so-called ‘brethren’, might find someone with similar ideals and values and leave the PPDC for them? Newton had already divulged that the ULA were intent on destroying the program- it wouldn’t surprise Hermann if this man was the infamous Prophet himself, the almighty leader of the ULA, Hannibal Chau!

How could he make the Marshal see that this was a mistake? “That’s impossible!” Hermann tries, anger seeping into his voice. “Impossible, Newton!”

“Is it? Is it impossible?”

“Impossible!” Hermann pleads, willing Newton not to go. Newt stares at the orange card in his hands, then at the Marshal, who gives them both a stern look.

“We’re in our last days of war, gentlemen,” is all he says before returning back to Mako and Raleigh’s training exercise.

“You don’t think-”

“No, Newton, it is not I who does not ‘think’, it is you!” Hermann attempts to snatch the card from Newton, but even without the pain, his injured hip slows him down, so he falls, defeated into his desk chair instead. “I thought you were dead, again, forever this time.”

“Herms, I have to go, I have to know-”

“Know what, whether this, this Chau fellow is your Prophet?”

“Whether the Kaiju are cloned war machines, Herms.” Newt spins the chair so that Hermann must look up at him, and he kisses the side of Hermann’s mouth, softly. He pulls back and neatens Hermann’s fringe with his fingers. “I’m gonna take care of myself this time.”

“Pah! I won’t come rushing after you if you- if something were to...I won’t...”

“You always come for me, Herms, you’re always there for me.”  Newt kisses him again in the same place, but this time Hermann allows him to make the kiss that bit deeper.

“Please take care of yourself, Newton,” Hermann breathes, and Newt grins.

“I’m gonna name my newest song ‘Soldier Husband off to War’.”  

* * *

2025

The first kick of memories wipes over them, of their childhoods, their mothers, their families, friends, school, playing in the garden, riding bikes, they link, they are compatible, their positives warm their minds. Tendo is congratulating them, reading off statistics when Mako’s head snaps to Raleigh.

They had just wanted to save the ship, the ten crewmembers, they disobeyed their orders because they were arrogant, they were brothers, they were heroes, they were cocky. They were defending the Miracle Mile in their glory, Gypsy Danger, and they were going to defend it well. Knifehead is a brute, but they have him in their grasp, they have defeated him.

It hurts so much, it hurts to much, Yancy is ripped from them, is torn from the pod, from the connection, is dead so quickly they cannot see whether he’s swallowed by the kaiju or if he’s plummeted into the bottom-less ocean and it hurts, they’re so tired, they cannot do it alone, they fire their cannons and they win but it is not a victory and they thud towards the shore, towards safety, towards land-

Raleigh snaps himself out of the memory, knowing any further and he will chase the rabbit, he will yearn for Yancy, he will attempt to go back, to try to change what had happened...

He is found by a man and a boy and he has survived, they babble over him, prodding him awake, keeping him warm...

He can feel Mako’s surprise, at his waking up in a warm bed, alive, and she is shocked-

Raleigh survived-

Raleigh is alive, he did not die in 2020, he is not PDS-

“She’s chasing the rabbit!” Tendo’s voice grates at Raleigh because he knows, he can see, he knows, he knows he has to stop her, has to stop her before she is pulled too deep, before he loses another partner, another part of his brain, one of the people left willing to step into a Jaeger, one of the brave few-

“Don’t chase the rabbit, Mako! Mako, can you hear me? Stay with me, Mako-”

Then he blinks, and Raleigh is standing in an alleyway that doesn’t belong to his memories. The sky is smoke-clogged, the street beyond is littered with rubble. He has never been here before, but can start to feel the familiarity seep into himself.

There is a harsh grating, a squeal intersmittern with clicks.

Familiarity clicks into dread. He’s been here before. Of course he’s been here before.

This is where he-

No-

This is where she-

Onibaba attacks Tokyo three weeks after Mako’s seventeenth birthday and her parents lose her in a crowd. She cowers behind a dustbin, rocking on her heels, unable to control her tears, when she hears the sound of choppers overhead. She has hope. She manages to kick herself to her feet, to stumble from the alley, to follow the choppers with her eyes. She sees a Jaeger appear in the distance, a monumental size even as it approaches.

“Mako! Listen to me, it’s not real!”

She protects her eyes from the glare of the sun illuminating the metal monolith as it lands. She can hear the systems within it whirring and clicking and living and strong and she wipes her tears on her coat sleeve. She cannot look behind her, she knows what is there, she ignores what is there. She makes a burst for it, knowing this final sprint will be the be all or end all of her life; she can feel shards of broken glass and rocks cutting into her foot as she runs, she has lost a shoe somewhere, she doesn’t care-

“Mako! Do not chase the rabbit- Mako-”

When Pentecost emerges from the Conn-pod, he reaches for the girl scrambling to climb the machine’s leg. He shouts at her, and she hears him. She hears his desperation, his encouragement, his faith in her, even if her high-school-learnt English cannot decipher his words. Her fingers can almost glance his, he is leaning so far out of the pod he nearly loses his balance. They lock eyes and he is focusing on her with an intensity that tells her that she was too slow, that he is refusing to look behind her, that that was her last chance at survival.

“Mako!”

She is speared through the stomach by an arm that ends in a claw and she watches as Stacker is pulled back into the pod by his red-headed partner. She see how he aches, he aches; what are millions of deaths to the death of a teenager you nearly saved, a teenager who made so much effort in her last moments, who had hope in her eyes that you had saved her, that you had given her her life-

Then she thuds to the concrete ground and she dies.

Mako opens her eyes with a gasped breath and Raleigh is cradling her in his lap.

He is so angry. Well she can be angry too.

“You are not PDS,” she says, and she feels betrayed. He cannot say anything. He is not prejudiced, but that will not matter. He has seen her die, and no amount of Mousse can hide this. His treatment of her will change. “I thought we were the same.”

* * *

2025

“You two are a goddamn disgrace,” Chuck bites out as he explodes from Stackers office and Herc slams the door in his face. “My old man seems to like you, but you’re dead weight, if you see what I mean, you and your little girlfriend both.”

Raleigh rolls his eyes and keeps silent, watching the door for the Marshal or Hansen Sr to finish.

“You’re going to get us all killed, and here’s the thing, Raleigh, I want to come back from this mission, ‘cos I quite like my life.” Chuck flicks Raleigh on the chest, right over his heart, as if that could stop it beating. “So why don’t you do us all a favour and disappear. It’s the only thing you’re good at anyway.

“Stop. Now.” Mako moves into Chuck’s space, but Raleigh puts an arm out to prevent her.

Chuck smirks. “Yeah that’s right, you hold her back. These rotters need to be kept on a leash.”

If there was any doubt in the Shatterdome that Chuck was still living, it was dispelled as quickly as Raleigh’s punches drew blood. The mostly PDS crowd cheered as the two living pummelled each other, finding the brawl much more entertaining when they could see the pain inflicted on them. Unlike when PDS fights were staged, they could hear the cries of pain when they were smashed into walls around the shouts of ‘apologies to her.’

“EYEY Enough! What’s going on! On your feet, both of you!”

“Becket! Mori. Into my office.”

The crowd scattered, as did the rumours.

* * *

2025

Becket catches Stacker by the arm as he walks through the doors leading outside after their meeting to discuss their failed drift, and Stacker looks at it, bemused and enraged that this Ranger, this child, has touched him.

“What do you mean, Mako is forbidden from piloting?”

“I mean, Ranger, I gave you your chance, and Miss Mori could not handle it. You will pilot your Jaeger with the candidate I assign you, or not at all.”

“This isn’t about that.” Becket glances at the beer bottle in Stacker’s hand, then at the wall. He looks like he has put two and two together. “I was there, I saw what she means to you, I saw how you watched her die.”

“Do NOT presume to know me, Ranger,” Stacker seethes. For five years, he’s kept his emotions under control, for five years, he’s not had a single Ranger disobey him, question him, or dare to provoke him.

It has been a long five years.

“You’re not protecting her, you’re holding her back.”

“Do not let this calm demeanour fool you into thinking this is a good moment for your insubordination, Mr. Becket.” Stacker can feel his eyes widen, his nostrils flare. “You have no idea who I am or where I’ve come from and I’m not about to tell you my whole life story.”

Stacker marches the few feet it takes until he’s below his sister’s plaque and kneels to put the bottle down. When he stands up, he steps into the Ranger’s space so that they’re practically breathing the same air. “I do not need your sympathy. I do not need your admiration. What I need from you is compliance, and if you do not give me that, I can send you back to the wall I found you crawling on.” He watches Becket’s jaw work. “Do I make myself clear?”

Becket looks like he’s holding his breath and he averts his eyes to nod, but Stacker’s been challenged, he’s had his authority questioned, and he will be damned before he will let this Ranger off the hook without putting him back in his place. Stacker points a finger to his ear and closes what little distance there is left between them.

“...yes, Sir.”

Stacker inspects the damage he’d done to the Ranger’s ego, and finds the deflated expression adequate. “Good.”


	8. The Past

2019

Stacker can see the girl as they land. He can also see the Kaiju, barely a hundred meters behind her. He and Tamsin decide what they will do instantly. He is unbuckling himself from the machine and scrambling up to open the Pod doors before the dust settles at Coyote Tango’s feet. The girl has had the same thought too, she has sprinted to the metal, has started her ascent, strong, thin fingers latching onto small joints in the metal, one bright red boot holding her up in dents, the other, sockless foot clinging on in smaller holes. She’s fast, strong, has almost made it. Tamsin is screaming at him to get back, to let her climb the rest of the way, but she’s so close, he could just grab her, he could speed it up, he could pull her in-

Stacker is yanked back into place moments after the sickening crack of a spine on the pavement. He shoves his helmet back into place, is back into the fighting position before the Kaiju can take another swing at them. He and Tamsin think about how old the girl must have been, they think about whether she was as old as Luna when she had been killed, they wonder if she had a brother or a partner who would miss her as sorely as they do-

They are recoiling from Onibaba’s third punch when Stacker is wrenched from the drift and Tamsin falls to the floor. He calls to her- he cannot understand, her medical charts are going haywire, but they haven’t been hit, they haven’t been injured, they had been winning-

Onibaba makes use of his faltered recovery and barrels at him, toppling the Jaeger now that Stacker cannot order it to move, pinning him down with its lobster-like limbs, crushing the metal, crushing the Conn-pod. He is desperate, fearful, he can see Tamsin is alive, but she’s not responding, why isn’t she responding, he can’t just let them die here. He draws all of his strength into his right arm and he pushes at the creature’s head, pushes, pushes until he can feel it budge, and he keeps going, keeps forcing the alien over until there’s a crack, the crack of shell splintering, and then he’s on top of it, its limbs clawing uselessly, trying to rock itself back to dominance, but he wont let it now that he’s got it. He punches at it, the punches getting easier as he gets used to piloting by himself, getting easier as he allows the feeling of revenge take its place in his heart, with no drift to calm him, his rage spills over, and he crushes the monster underneath him, pulverises it.

He stops when blood starts dripping from his nose and a dawning realisation hits him. He glances over to Tamsin and she has it too, the blood, the lightheadedness. He does not faint as she had, but he collapses when they are brought back to the medical bay.

Radiation poisoning.

 

* * *

 

2022

Stacker closes the latest meeting with his financial advisor and wants to punch something very hard in the face, repeatedly. Instead, he gathers his coat and goes for a walk. He’s been having the nightmare again, reminded of its particulars by the reappearance of Mako Mori. When he’d seen her, lined up with the Wei’s and the scientists, his heart had leapt. His mind had been blank for long enough to forget that all those lined up in that parade of newcomers were rotters, that they had died. That she was no different. That she had not miraculously escaped Onibaba’s claws, that the crack had not been her body breaking on the ground.

It had been later that evening, when he had pulled her file out from his clipboard, that he had seen. Seen the brand that had been stamped on top of her medical history that just read ‘PDS’ in large, red letters. And then she had taken, more recently, to appearing at his door and hounding him with questions he couldn’t answer, criticisms about his treatment of PDS sufferers. It made his blood boil, it made his heart remind his brain what it had been like to have people in his life so devoid of reason they would sacrifice themselves for others.

He wishes he could visit Tamsin, but her hospital will not release a cancer patient to transfer her to the medical facilities across the globe just for a visit, and he doubts he’s going to be getting leave, paid or otherwise, anytime within the next few years.

Instead, he goes to the plaque. He doesn’t have flowers, but he brings a bottle of the beer he’d been hording in his room for the occasion and opens it for her. He leaves it with the dead or dying plants wrapped in cellophane, the small toys, the hundreds of cards. It is one of the many similar plaques on the Shatterdome’s outer wall, and it is replicated on every Shatterdome wall across the earth.

This plaque commemorates the RAF pilots killed by Trespasser, when they had no idea what they were up against. So many British and American pilots lost their lives in a battle that lasted six days, so many veterans, teenagers, brave soldiers losing their lives in a battle they couldn’t have won.

Stacker has spent the best part of this year surrounded by the risen, the Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferers, the ones lucky enough to have been given their bodies back, to be returned to their families, has been promoted to a position where he must organise and surround himself with them, must implore them to come and work for him, and yet here he is, parent-less, sister-less, with his former drift-partner not dying quick enough to have risen, and he not dying slow enough not to notice. He smiles slightly, imploringly. “Wake up, Luna…It’s time to wake up...” 


	9. 2025

2025

“Pssst.” Newt’s attention is drawn from the piece of UV-lit paper in his hands to the creepy-looking bald man hissing at him from behind the store’s countertop. The glass top is strewn with various pills, papers and powders, the pestle and mortar looking as if it’d been ground to its last legs. The guy is grinning at him knowingly, reaches to pick a packet out from a drawer and hands it to Newt. “Bone powder.”

“B-I’m sorry, what? Bone powder?” Newt’s glasses have started steaming up from the heat of the shop, and he’s already disoriented enough without this weirdo trying to sell him double entendres. “Why would I need that?”

“Male potency. Mmph,” the man confirms, making a vaguely vulgar motion and completely ruining what little an imagination Newt had left. The man shoves the small bottle at him and Newt gawks-

“This-this is definitely not bone powder.” Newt had made these pills himself, or at least, he’d made the recipe, and Kaiju body parts, however similar the colouring, had nothing to do with their creation process.

“Yes, yes, I take it myself!” The man says, pounding him on the shoulder. “Makes you feel alive again.”

“Uh no, thank you.” Newt hands the bottle back, wondering as he does if he should have wiped the bottle of his fingerprints. He isn’t a very good criminal. “I’m looking for Hannibal Chau. I was told I could find him here?”

“Hannibal Chau, eh.” The man pockets the bottle and opens the door, showing Newt into the back room. “Good luck.”

As Newt wanders around the well-stocked room, drinking in the wonders, metal shoes clink across the floor towards him.

“What’s a PDS PPDC brat doing around these parts, hmm?”

“How did you- I mean- that information is highly confidential-”

Chau tips down his glasses to reveal his split, off-white eyes. “Can’t be keeping a fellow disciple out of the loop, can we?” Oh great, Newt thinks, looking the frankly terrifying man up and down. Well, at least he wasn’t the Prophet. Disciple was pretty horrendous and Herms would probably kill him for this conversation later, but there were worse outcomes.

Chau directs them onto a balcony as a gong sounds and people, Buena Kai, Newt realises, start to crowd around their holy Bones. “Look at ‘em. Think the Kaiju are sent for heaven, that the gods are expressing their ‘displeasure’ at our behaviour.”

There had been some overlap between the ULA and the Buena Kai members as of late, and it was these few who usually dictated the more extreme movements. With the talk of second risings, of second judgement days, aspects from pre-Kaiju religions mingled with post, either sparking vicious feuds or unbreakable alliances. Not wanting to offend a man whose balcony overlooked the temple, Newt swallows.

“And what do you believe?” Being a disciple surely meant that Chau was a devout ULA member right? ...but then again, Newt was hardly the poster-child for the holy- he was technically Jewish, which kind of screwed with the Liberation Army’s whole Christian theme, even before the suicide and the not-listening-to-the-Prophet-and-prioritising-your-boyfriend-instead thing.

“I believe that Oblivion Blue made from phony Kaiju ‘Bone Powder’ is 500 bucks a bottle.”

Oh good, so a fellow con in the upper echelons of the Army.

“Well?” Hannibal asks, hands on hips. “What d’ya want?”

“I need to access a Kaiju brain. Completely intact.”

“What do you need one of those for? Anything else, sells.The brain? Too much ammonia. So what’s the deal, lil’ fella.”

Newt wonders about how specific Stacker had intended him to be about the whole drift thing, or whether he was supposed to just keep it all confidential, but really, even if he didn’t die in the next few hours, he wasn’t exactly going to be allowed to tell anyone a PDS sufferer had saved the world, so he might as well tell one person. “I figured out how to drift with a Kaiju.”

“Are you funning with me, son?” Hannibal uncrosses his arms, sunglasses glinting. “People like us don’t ‘drift’ without a living partner.”

Newt begins a spiel about how fascinating the hive-mind is, but he gets about a seventh into his analysis before Chau pulls at his eye and inspects the shot of black blood colouring it. “Holy jeez- you’ve gone and done it, haven’t you.”

Newt pouts, slightly, because that one was definitely a little bit confidential, but also, he was a freaking BAMF, so… “I did it a little bit, yeah.”

Chau pushes Newt away, and Newt feels a little offended to have been cut so short.“You god damned moron.”

...oh. That didn’t sound too good. And neither did the sirens that’d started ringing around them.

One of Chau’s men runs up to him and whispers in his ear before retreating out of Newt’s line of sight. “What was that, what’s happening?”

 

* * *

 

“Movement in the breach,” Glados says, and Tendo frowns and puts down the mugs of coffee (all his round for his Living colleagues,) to turn towards the raging red monitor. “Double event.” The alrams have sent people scattering to and from their stations and it’s not long before pilots, techs and the Marshall himself crowd around him so that he can introduce the basic stats and deploy those who need to be deployed to face the newly named Otachi and Leatherback.

It is barely hours later that Tendo must read off three new names that will soon have empty graves. “Typhoon is down,” he states, with heavy heart. They were kids, two Living brothers defending their PDS triplet. Then, not five minutes later, “W-we just lost Cherno, Sir.” It’s nearly a miracle that all Leatherback does with its burst of power is halt the Hansens; Tendo has had to confirm five of his greatest friends’ failures, he doesn’t need two more.

Hermann rabbits something about the electricity being a weapon not a defence and the Marshall blows him off, demanding a link with Striker that Tendo cannot create because of the lack of electricity, God damn it. “All of them are digital!” he cries, useless without his technology.

“Not all of them, Marshall.” Had Tendo not been so emotionally distraught by the circumstances, he’d have revelled in Becket’s defiant crossed arms, but right now, he just felt apprehensive about sending equally angry pilots of Gipsey out into the battlefield, and slightly sick at having to organise their funerals.

 

* * *

 

“We’ve gotta get out, there’s two goddamned Kaiju heading this way.”

Newt shakes his head, wanting to laugh. “Nonono. Two? There’s never been two before!”

“Well maybe that’s because nobody’s drifted with one before, ey, genius?” Newt can see visions of Hermann in his mind, hear snippets of his voice as he raves about his predictions of a double event.

“It wasn’t me,” he tries to say, but Chau speaks over the top of him.

“When Jaeger pilots drift, it sets up a connection, a bridge.”

Newt nods, he knows this stuff, he’s pioneered it, “Of course, yeah, right!”

“Both ways! A hive mentality! You said!” Chau is walking towards him and his pure aggressive presence pushes Newt back, tripping over his own feet across the room as Chau gesticulates.  “Maybe they’re looking for you!”

“What- but- what’re we going to do?”

“I’m gonna wait out this shitstorm in my own private bunker, but you-” Newt is grabbed by the collar and is hauled through the door and out into the street. Chau gives him a shove and one of his cronies comes up behind Newt, twisting something between her fingers.

She reaches behind him, to his neck- to the injection wound leading into his spine- “What- what is that, what’re you doing-”

“Kaiju bone powder,” Chau says, shaking a bottle. Newt looks at the empty pill capsule in the woman’s hand and he wants to be sick, she’s poured it into his body directly, full dosage, undiluted, “Maybe we can break that link with the Kaiju by rotting your mind.” Hannibal tucks the bottle back into his pocket as Newt’s vision swims. “Now get the hell out of here”

 

* * *

 

“NO! Don’t disengage-” too late, Herc is thrown against the far wall, sending splintering shocks down his arm as he crashes to the metal grilling of the floor. Chuck disengages barely a second later, hauling him up. “Get on your feet old man!”

“Don’t call me that!” Herc shakes his son off, shooting him a snarl to get one in return, testing his arm to check its status. It didn’t hurt, but then again, nothing did. He’d probably fractured some ribs, judging by how his side smarted as he walked, and his arm was hanging suspiciously limp against his side.

“It’s right outside, we’ve gotta get out of here!” Chuck didn’t sound afraid, and Herc wasn’t sure how to react to the knowledge that he’d not be able to comfort his son had he been. There was something welling in the pit of his stomach, and if that didn’t make him human, then gods knew what did. He’d been an advocate of PDS rights, of course he had, and he’d never denied being partially deceased. But if anything, staring at his second death was much more terrifying than his first. He’d had his chance at redemption, his chance to have made things right with Chuck, but he still pushed his kid around, still treated him like shit. He’d wasted so much.

“We’re not going anywhere.” Herc quashed the feeling of inadequacy as he marched to the opposite side, grabbing the emergency kit. “You and I are the only thing standing between that ugly bastard and a city of ten million people. Now we have a choice here, we either sit and wait, or we take these flare guns and we do something really stupid.”

 

* * *

 

“Move, move, move, move- I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor! Move, move!” Newt latches on to the stream of bodies coursing into the underground shelters, allowing himself to be drifted along, stumbling more often, lungs starting to clog, he coughs, can barely keep himself up, keeps having to clear his throat, his rasps sound like he’s wearing a gasmask, he can see the doors shut behind him, keeps panting, his mind is going black, where is he- what is he-

The room shuffles into quiet and the jostling stops so that the people in the room can locate the sound of the Kaiju- they all flinch as the ceiling releases crumbs of dust and plaster- the man next to her is breathing as if he needs an inhaler, she checks to see if he’s okay- his eyes are dark and sunken, his lips are black, he’s stumbling, barely upright, he’s shaking his head, eyes bulging, gasping for breath-

“ROTTER!” she screams, and the people around them skitter back, pushing at each other to escape from the voice, “he’s rabid, he’s rabid!” they cry as the man’s unseeing eyes turn to them all and they push back against the walls, there’s a monster on top of them and a monster among them, they panic, clawing at one another, the rabid is the nearest danger, they focus on it, until someone pushes it to the ground, the rabid’s glasses smash to the ground and as they do there’s a earthquaking thump above them and the lights die out, plunging them into darkness, they scream, the rabid flinches too-

A second thump and a claw pummels through the roof and the rabid is forgotten, the Kaiju is here, it’s here, its jaws cannot fit through the hole, and it screeches and they fall to the ground, but the rotter stands up, it stands up and then-

A rope? A tentacle, a- a tongue, illuminated, alien, unnatural flickers into the room among them and curls around the rabid, splitting into three and lifting him a few feet off the ground and then depositing him back and then it retracts, they curl into themselves, expecting a second claw to punch through and bury them all but- its footsteps get quieter, it’s leaving, it’s leaving?

From far off, they hear mental crash with skin and it’s a Jaeger, they’re safe-

“The rabid!” a man shouts to her left, and the victory doesn’t seem so sweet then, the tension returns, they stare at the circled man, who has fallen to the floor and isn’t moving-

 

* * *

 

The two Kaiju are defeated by Mako and Raleigh in their atmospheric battle and the members of Shatterdome are collected on the roof when Hermann gets his commands from the Marshal. “Go get Dr. Geiszler, now!” Hermann salutes and is running off, helicopter for this purpose already arranged, data on Newton’s possible whereabouts already collected.

Hermann’s helicopter touches down where they assume Hannibal’s crew are, and they find them, already knee deep in Kaiju innards, Chau spitting out orders, but no Newton in sight. Hermann looks around, desperate, if he’s not here, then where is he, until his eyes are drawn to a squabble to one side of the carcass, and where there’s trouble, there’s Newton, so Hermann marches towards it and sure enough-

“Newton?” Hermann’s steps are slow as he approaches because Chau’s men are visibly on edge, which is too unlike them, and Newton isn’t with the entrails, which is too unlike him, and there’s a wheezing sound coming from his direction, and he sees what they’re worried about, and the black bags under Newton’s eyes are not from his usual sleep deprivation. “Newton,” he tries again, pushing through the ranks of underlings with their guns all trained on him.

There are screams from behind them and they all startle, attention instantly placed on the sound of a body ripping open, a screech, smaller but close, too close, almost infant-like, it wails and in the dark they can see the Kaiju illuminated as it crawls towards them-

 

* * *

 

Becket’s still in his uniform when he follows after Stacker. “How sick are you?” the kid asks, Mako’s worry filtering into his own. “And why didn’t you tell me?”

“Hah… what’s to tell?” Stacker grabbed a towel and glanced at Becket’s reflection in the mirror. “You know those Mark ones, we scraped them bad boys together in fourteen months… last thing we were thinking of was radiation screening.” He watched Becket wince, carried on undeterred. “I stayed under the medical radar for a while. Last time I jockeyed was Tokyo. Finished a fight solo, but for three hours, it burned. They warned me if I ever stepped into a Jaeger again, the toll would be too much. My partner wasn’t so lucky.”

“The plaque?” Becket asks, quietly, head tilting in the direction of the outer wall.

“No,” Stacker is too-quick to dismiss. “My partner is being treated back home. Tamsin didn’t die fast enough,” he says, holding Raleigh’s eye, and the boy gulps, knowing the guilt of a survivor wishing for a death and subsequent revival all too well.  

“Then it’s family, sir, that you pay your respects to.” Becket’s unflinching gaze is starting to irk Stacker, his ability to perceive edging too close to painful. Stacker had not told his ward, Mako, just how much she had reminded him of his sister, just how cruel it would have seemed to Tamsin to have so crudely adopted her as a near replacement under the guise of a father-figure. Luna had always hated being treated like a child, had always spat ‘you’re not dad’ back in Stacker’s face, but Mako had craved it, had needed the discipline, the regulation. “You and I aren’t as different as you think, Marshal,” Becket says, as if he knows.

“A lost sibling does not mean you understand me, Ranger,” Sacker grits out, throwing his towel back to the washbasin and thankfully being interrupted by the incessant buzz of his intercom.

 

* * *

 

Hermann and henchmen alike are rooted in place as they watch the monster pull itself towards them, until it is suddenly snapped back, the cord around its neck, it chokes, cries and crashes to the floor and there’s silence again as those who still had hearts tried to slow the beating.

“He’s rabid!” Comes a shout, and they’re all turning back again, to face Newton, to watch him pant.

Hermann blocks the man who’d shouted off with his body, putting himself between gun and Newton. “No, no, he’s- he’s fine, Newton, he’s still in there, he’s not going to hurt anyone.”

Another cronie tries to make her way around Hermann, eyes darting from Kaiju to Newton and definitely Living by the panic in her face. “You need to get out of the way, right now!”

“No! He’s trying to fight it, he can hear me, he knows me,” Hermann closes the distance between them, shielding Newton from more of the weapons. “He’s still in there”

Newt grabs Hermann’s coat collar, body wracked with shakes, eyes trying desperately to hold onto Hermann’s- the crowd around them flinches, fingers clutching triggers- Hermann doesn’t look away, holds on to Newton’s outstretched arms, holds him steady-

There’s a screech, the Kaiju isn’t dead, it leaps at them one last time, wiping a couple of henchmen out of the way as it does and Hermann tackles Newton to the ground, away from it, to safety. He can hear the Kaiju crunching, screaming, a shoe drops to the side of Hermann’s head and there’s another crash, hopefully the last, the miniature alien dropping dead.

Hermann protects Newt from it all, lying on top of him, hoping to god, to anything that they make it through this, that they get through this trial, that they get to live in death- he doesn’t open his eyes until long after people start to get up again, only shifts when he feels movement underneath him.

“It’s alright, you’re alright.” Hermann cups Newton’s face, dusting off as much dust, scrubbing black fluid from Newton’s mouth with the cuff of his sleeve. Newton opens his eyes, looks bleary, but slowly focuses on Hermann.

“Did I- did I hurt anyone?”

Unbelievable. Unbelievable Newton, only he could bring himself back from a rabid state, only he could ask whether he’d injured anyone as his first question, as his first thought. “No- no, you didn’t, you beat it- It’s okay, it’s okay,” he strokes Newton’s hair, helps pull him up.  He doesn’t let go, one arm around Newton’s waist, the other pushing gawping people out of the way.

“Miss Mori and Mr Becket defeated the two Kaiju,” he says, pulling Newton over to where he had had accompanying J-tech staff set up a computer and deposit Newton’s ridiculous hand-made machine.

“And that? What is that?” Newton asks, eyes locked on the steaming- child. It was a child, it was premature, undeveloped, its mandibles weren’t fused, its eyes bulged.

“I do not have the faintest idea,” Hermann admits, dropping his arm from around Newton so that he can use both hands to type into the computer.

“Its brain- we can get at its brain, its skull can’t be too thick, it won’t be brain dead for another five minutes.”

Hermann’s fingers still and his jaw drops. “Newton! You cannot drift in this state, that’s ridiculous!” He grabs Newton by the shoulder, manhandling his gaze away from the body. “You just pulled yourself out of a rabid state. You’ve already drifted once today, I cannot allow you to- to put yourself in that- thing’s mind.”

Newton pulls out a device from somewhere about his person and the screen flickers manically. “The neural interface is off the charts, if we don’t do something now-” Newton sprints past Hermann, picking up a black plastic tube ending in a glowing drill and hefts it up with him onto the Kaiju’s head. He plunges it down into the skull, jumps off and grabs a headset from beside Hermann. “Hopefully we can argue about this after I haven’t died again, but for now, if you wanna help, help with this.”

“Fine. Fine!” Hermann resumes typing into the computer, presses enter difinitively and turns on Newton, grabbing the second headset. “In the words of Mr. Hansen, pilots are meant to drift together, share the neural load. That’s what they do. I will go with you.”

“You’re serious? You would do that for me? Or- or, with me?”  Hermann’s never been more serious in his life and that’s some achievement. But if the sacrifice he must make for potentially saving Newton’s life is melding his brain to the recently dead remnants of a still-warm alien child, well there are surely less worthy causes.

They set up the machine, countdown, Newton presses the button and-

-then it’s over, like that, and he’s seen a thousand years, seen millenia flood by, he’s seen his childhood until his death and then onwards, through to his and Newton’s kisses- he’s seen an alien dimension, alien overlords creating life, creating war machines, dimensional rifts, he’s seen- he’s seen Newton sitting alone in his apartment and running a bath and crying, bringing the scalpel to his wrist-

“Are you okay?” Newton asks and he can sense the trickle of blood from his nose, which is better than his eye, at least.

“Yes, of course.” Hermann hasn’t felt this ill since he’d forgotten he could not digest, had made himself a cup of tea out of habit and had spent the rest of the evening spilling the contents of his stomach into a toilet bowl, which, he noted, he needed to find right now, for the same was about to happen.

 

* * *

 

“You are a brave girl,” Stacker tells Mako as he stander in the hanger, fully suited and ready for the battle that will win the war. “I am so lucky to have seen you grow.”

“But I have not grown, I am no different, no better-”

“Hey, what you’ve done, what you will do, that’s because you’ve trained. Hard. You’ve done your parents proud, Mako, and you’ve made me proud.” Stacker’s thumb strokes her hair, where jet black locks met blue, and realises he is looking at her, looking at Mako Mori, not Luna Pentecost. He is hit with a tide of emotion, as if Mako has finally replaced Luna, guilt at having forgotten his sister for even a second, for caring for this young woman just as much as he’d cared for one that died many years ago.

But then he realises. He realises that both deserve better.

He could never replace Luna, of course he couldn’t, but she was never his to replace. She would have admonished him for feeling ‘obliged’ to think of her, to revere her, respect her, remember her every second of his life until it became his duty to live up to her memory. She would have hated him for reducing Mako Mori to a tool.

He can feel pinpricks of tears well in his eyes and he hates it, he hates the pain that flourishes in his heart, at realising how much letting go hurts, but he needs to, he owes Mako the respect of being her own person.

She is his family just as much as Luna had been, as much as Tamsin is. “To do this, I need you to protect me,” he hears himself say, and Mako nods, overwhelmed with premature grief. Stacker had been too occupied with telling Luna to grow up, he’d missed her doing so. He was lucky to have watched Mako adapt, even if she had not done so physically. Stacker was blessed.

“Today, we’re cancelling the apocalypse.” 


	10. The Future

“I thought I’d find you here.” Since the closing of the breach three days ago, Raleigh had been feeling the indescribable pull of emotion tugging at every fibre of his body. It’s an emotion he knows well, one that a pilot gets after drifting with someone for too long a time period and is then separated for too long. He’d only just started to loosen the sensation of Yancy being just behind him.

“If you knew, why did it take you three days?”

Raleigh stands beside Mako, back to the wall, watching the sun set over the bay. If anything since the Kaiju, sunsets have become all the more beautiful, what with the denser pollution in the atmosphere creating more vivid colours. It also helped that Raleigh appreciated them more… each on could be his last. Or, not any more, he supposed. He could learn to think about future sunsets. He looks down to where she is sitting, cross-legged, facing the wall, head resting against the smooth concrete.

“I thought… I thought I had an excuse. To not see you in pain. I told myself I didn’t want to have anyone talk to me after Yancy. But then I realised I did, that I would’ve cried sooner if…” Raleigh lets the sentence go, turning back to the bay.

“It hurts,” Mako says, shoulder hunching, arms wrapping around herself. There’s a bottle of Pentecost’s cherished beer in her hand. Raleigh wonders how long she’s been out here, unable to put the bottle down, to leave it at the plaque. “I cannot feel anything and it hurts. It still hurts.”

Raleigh gets a shot of pain through his heart, because that was unimaginable. To not be able to physically relieve the pain. That’s why Raleigh had gone into ‘construction’, wasn’t it? Because the life expectancy of someone working on the wall was lower than ever, because he had to haul weights more than his body mass up towering structures? Because he liked the lick of a flame too close to his hand? A power saw too close to his leg? Either he would die on the wall or the pain would remind him that he was guilty for living. Guilty that it was him here and not Yancy.

“It’s gonna hurt for a while.” Raleigh slides himself down so his shoulder is almost touching hers and wraps his arms around his knees. He can’t see the sun now, the railing obscuring his view, so he leans his head back to look at the murky twilit sky.

Mako takes a deep breath, but doesn’t move, her clothes like an insect’s armour. “...I wanted you to be here with me. I tried to think it hard enough that you would notice.”

“...you did?” Raleigh asks, gaze lowering and turning to take Mako in, because- but then- he’d thought the tugging had been his own, like with Yancy, but if it was coming from Mako, if she had been sending him the thoughts- No. Yancy was dead. He knew that. Yancy was dead. “...I’m sorry. I’m a bad partner.”

He hears Mako sniff, then she moves her head a fraction so that he can see the corner of one of her eyes peeking out to look at him. “Yes.”

“Yes?” Raleigh repeats with a laugh. “No, you’re supposed to say ‘no mister Raleigh you’re the best partner ever, I totally misjudged you that day we met.’”

Mako huffs, then slams her nearest shoulder into his, taking him completely unawares and sending him toppling to the side. “No. You are a bad partner who did not sense my sadness beams and have not yet hugged me.”

“Hugged you?” Raleigh scoffs as he rights himself, dusting away imaginary dirt from his jumper. “You’d be lucky to get a kind word out of me, let alone a hug.”

Mako returns to staring at the wall, fingers playing with the label of the bottle, slowly peeling away the corners of the paper exclaiming the brew to be ‘London Pride’. “See? You are a bad partner.”

Raleigh chuckles, stretching his legs out in front of him. Then he raps a knuckle on her back.

“What do you want Mr. Bad Partner?”

“Would you like a hug?”

“Yes.” Mako leans back and places the bottle to her left, pushing it slightly until the front label faces the bay. Then she swings her focus to Raleigh. “Would you like a hug?”

The question, like her shove before, takes Raleigh by surprise. He’s not used to being asked. He has orders, he obeys and disobeys, but he is never asked. Requested for an opinion. He’s used to being the younger sibling. To do as Yancy does. To do as Pentecost says. To do as the Earth needs. What does Raleigh want. He gulps. “Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

Mako nods, as if they’ve just completed a transaction, and she shifts herself nearer, so that she’s at a better angle to reach out, to pull Raleigh close, to grip onto the back of his shirt with alarming strength, fingers snagging his skin in the pinched embrace, despite the thickness of the jumper. He allows his arms to wrap around her, and as their heads rest against each other, memories that aren’t his swamp him with ferocity enough that he finds himself mimicking them without intention. He soothes her back in the pattern her mother had done when Mako had had a nightmare when she was a child. He whispers that it is going to be okay in the slight Osakan accent her father had had.

He knows that she cannot cry, but as they hug, he feels her sob, and he has tears enough for the both of them.

 

* * *

 

“Do you not have something better to do with your time, Mister Choi?” It wasn’t the first time that day, let alone week Hermann had asked the question.

“I am doing something, I’m observing the laws of nature.”

“Watching a bagel decompose in a petri dish as some kind of morbid timing device does not constitute ‘observing the laws of nature’.” The chalk Hermann had been holding in his hand snaps in two, but even that does not calm him as it usually does. “For pity’s sake, I have had to put up with one foul, disruptive presence in my lab for goodness knows how many years, I do not need another making mess and observing rot.”

“First off, it’s our lab?” Newt rolls his eyes, an exaggerated motion so that both members of the lab would see. “And I watched mould activity in like my toddler years, okay? Don’t lump me in with Junior over there.”

“Junior is taking an interest in science since any day now he could be kicked out onto the streets.” Tendo readjusted his bowtie, trying for a sad, homeless kind of expression.

Hermann sighed, rubbing his forehead as if he could feel a headache. “Do you not have a wife to return to, Mister Choi? A child? Go home, forget about the Kaiju, about the PPDC, the breach monitors.”

“If it was that easy, you two wouldn’t be here either.” Tendo poked the decaying bread with the tip of his pen.

“Hey, some of us are still working, okay?” Newt shook a measuring jug, showing that yes, he was still doing science, thank you, until the chemicals inside the jug took to fizzing in an eerie way, and he stopped, hoping neither had heard that.

Hermann glanced at him, rolling his eyes in a way that said ‘of course I heard that you idiot.’

“If I wasn’t here, that glance would have ended in you two kissing. Or arguing. Either way, you’d have forgotten about your science.” Tendo sighed to drown out the spluttered ‘we would never’ / ‘why would you even say something like that’ / ‘Geiszler and I have a strictly professional relationship’. “Would it be too obvious i’m craving my breakfast ritual if I started a second petri dish with coffee?”

 

* * *

 

“Yancy Becket. Chuck Hansen. Luna and Stacker Pentecost. Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky. Cheung, Jin and Hu Wei Tang. These are only nine names.” Raleigh glances around the gathered crowd, cameras flashing, microphones crowding, people anticipating.

“These are the names that I remember. Who died fighting. ...Who died too young.” Another round of flashes. He gulps. “They are heroes. We will never forget that. But now, now they have families who mourn. Who pour drinks onto empty graves. Who miss them.” He takes a long look at those on the stage besides him, at Herc, at Mako, at Tendo, Geiszler and Gottlieb.

“Each of us remember the war differently. Each of us remember someone who has died.” Raleigh smiled then, and the cameras watched, judging. “When we were trying to name this charity, everyone wanted to name it something different. The Pentecost. The Charles. The Yancy. We tried working out who deserved it more, and then we realised that everyone has lost something, whether it be part of themselves, or of their soul.

“What this charity is for is to help people recover. To help evacuated children find their parents. To help parents find their children. To help brothers and sisters and siblings and children, whether blood or bond, find one another, and to mourn and to recover.”

“With a heavy heart to the past and open mind to the future, we hope you will help us in making the Shatterdome Foundation something we can all be proud of. Thank you.” Raleigh nods, a remnant of Mako’s mind telling him to bow, and he gulps. People are applauding as if it was his idea, as if this is his fruit to sell. It had been all of theirs, but Mako had thought of it. Had pioneered it. She still could not talk about Stacker Pentecost and so he had taken the role of spokesperson.

As he steps back, Hansen claps him on the shoulder, locking their eyes. “My kid’d never have admitted it ...but he’d have been grateful. We both are.” Raleigh is knocked speechless and is embraced in a thunderous hug by the man, generating another round of applause.

When Herc lets go, he moves towards Mako and bows, low, and she returns the gesture, equally as respectful. She is brought into a hug as strong as his first but when Herc pulls back, he voices his comment a pitch quieter, the sentiment private. “That’s my girl. A hug like that? Make any father proud.” He ruffles her hair and goes to join the scientists, who both get a jostle and a grin.

“You’re like a dad at a wedding,” Tendo laughs, grin pulling at his lips. “It’s almost a shame Chuck isn’t here to tell you how embarassing you are for making all the children cry.” Mako looks like a waterfall even without the tears, and Raleigh is trying his hardest to mob up his own dripping eyes with his sleeves.

“You can keep your trap shut, Elvis.”

 

* * *

 

An agonising half year passed before Newt finally looked up from his microscope with a semblance of hope. After the Foundation’s feel-good opening ceremony (see: tears everywhere), so little had happened, people were near enough to start a war themselves just to get their blood pumping again.

The ULA had faded into obscurity and so the helpless devout had had two options: to overdose on Blue Oblivion and carry out their acts of terrorism, or to ‘better themselves’, to find a new group of likeminded individuals that created a community feeling without being ostracised. Thankfully the Shatterdome Foundation was very much PDS-approved.

Tendo and Hermann were sat at the table, Hermann trying to clear Tendo’s latest ‘experiments’, small dissected mice caught from around the Shatterdome, off the table and into the bin, while Tendo furiously tried to reason that he was getting better, that next he could move on to larger mammals.

Newt cleared his throat, opting for dramatic. Tendo and Hermann ceased their bickering, but not goodnaturedly, both grimacing at him and sending him ‘you’d better have a good reason for interrupting’ vibes.

Newt placed a vial, like the ones used when injecting Neurotriptyline between them, though this contained a liquid that was sky blue, and eerily so, not the sapphire of Blue Oblivion, but a true, electric blue.

“Is that?” Hermann asked, mice long forgotten.

“The cure? Maybe. I need to test it.” The unsaid knowledge that there were hundreds of potential test subjects within cells, just ready to be written off as ‘rabid’ sat between them as they stared at the vial.

Tendo shifted first, something harder in his expression. “I’ll do it.”

Newt shakes his head. “It’s one thing experimenting on myself, and on chunks of alien flesh, but...” He’d risked Hermann because they’d been on the spot, in that alley, with less than five minutes until it was too late. As far as they knew, they had all the time in the world for these experiments, and if that meant not using Tendo, then that’s what it meant.

Tendo sighs, a heart-wrenching sound, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Please, Newt. I need this, and I need it soon, or…”

Newt has known that pain, that desperation, the lack of desperation, the complete apathy... He can see it in Tendo, starting to solidify, the look that thinks that nothing is going to get better. It makes his heart clench because he is in no position to chastise Tendo for something he failed to conquer on his own. He has no advice to give, because he doesn’t know how he would have been lucky enough to come back, both physically and mentally, without Hermann dragging him to sanity.

As if he can feel his name in Newt’s thoughts, Hermann bristles beside him and take a  small step forwards. “I would appreciate it, Mr. Choi,” Hermann says, voice uncharacteristically dark, “If you could please refrain from using Doctor Geiszler’s history as emotional blackmail for your own gain.”

Tendo’s mouth is pulled taut and Newt watched as sparks fly between the men, eyes glinting, gazes sharp as knives. “And I would appreciate it if Dr. Geiszler gave me the damned treatment.”

“Okay, settle down!” Newt wants to laugh, it’s finally the day he’s the ‘responsible adult’ in charge of settling an argument between Herms and Tendo. He steps between them, pressing one hand against Hermann’s chest to push him back, the other he uses to make swatting motions with until Tendo falls back a couple of strides.

“As much as I am enjoying having my honour fought over by my dear sweet prince,” Newt turns his back to Hermann and folds his arms, knowing that seeing Hermann’s expression right now would absolutely kill his resolve. “I’ll do the experiment,” he pronounces. “If it works, Tendo gets dibs on batch two.”

“I forbid it.”

Hermann says it with such unopposable finality, and Newt can hear that he will not be allowed a… what is it now, fourth? opportunity to kill himself in front of Hermann’s eyes.

“And then we’re back to square one again!” Tendo exclaims, sounding exhausted. “I want to do it. I’m dead, I don’t have a job, I don’t have what you two have after this. No family, an ex-wife. If God wants me here on Earth, he will protect me.”

Newt shifts uncomfortably, never having been able to deal with matters of faith, but Hermann is different. “Why bring religion into this?” He asks, aggravated. “The idea of a singular, benevolent god is preposterous at best, your hope in divine intervention is illwarented, science has evidence, factual basis, religion has- what, exactly?”

Tendo breaths a loud “Hah!” shaking his head as if there’s a crowd around them, appealing for their sympathy. “What does religion bring me? Love. Hope. What’s so wrong about my believing that even if this did kill me, fully this time, I would be going to a better place?”

Newt breaths slowly, like a trapped animal trying not to let either predator know he was there. Relations had been frayed recently, with nothing but free time, Tendo’s divorce and a closed breach to occupy their minds.

“The fact that if you were to die, Newton would place the blame wholly on his shoulders,” Hermann says, too quiet, his voice sounding like a pulled punch, the edge too soft to sit well after the harshness. “That we would not know whether you were in heaven or in a box six feet below the ground.”

They both turn to Newt and suddenly he’s gone straight back from referee to object of attention.

“It’s my choice,” Tendo maintains, but he’d quietened too, sounding resigned.

Hermann’s jaw works. “Do not make Newton internalise your decision.”

All three return to staring at the vial.

“Jesus, it’s cold enough to freeze the medals off a brass monkey in ‘ere.”

“Marshal?” Hermann, bless his soul, stands, saluting at the voice, caution at his being in the room. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d have noticed the temperature, unless you have something similar to our Mr. Becket to admit.”

“No, no.” Herc folded his arms, tipping his head in their direction. “I can see the ruddy  ice forming around you. What’s got you fellas so down, eh?”

The three looked between one another in a totally-not-suspicious way at all, trying to decide what they were about to admit to.

“I think i’ve developed a cure for PDS that could revert a sufferer back to a living state,” Newt blurts, the secret weighing too much on his shoulders. “Tendo volunteered as first subject because none of us want to use the people the PPDC deem ‘rabid’ but I don’t know if it’ll work but then i’ve been using Tendo’s blood and tissue as test material for the last few years anyway so if anything it’ll react to him best because I know what chemicals have been in and out of his body.”

“You’ve been doing what?” Hermann asks at the same time as Hansen says “What’s the chance of success?”

“I-” Newt looks to Tendo for his permission and Tendo closes his eyes before nodding, wrapping his arms around himself. “Tendo asked me to find a way to see if I could get HRT to respond to a PDS patient so I’d been using his blood to test hormone treatments, but when that didn’t work, I started thinking about the drift and the fact that living and PDS pilots can drift together and then because I thought Raleigh and Mako were both PDS I thought it would be okay to drift by myself with another technically dead thing and then that happened and kind of worked so I thought about maybe a shock-therapy slash hormone thing with a build-up of treatment kick-started by a drift like a, a kind of defibrillator? I don’t know, is that mad? It might be completely mad.”

“You volunteered, Choi?” Herc is given a nod and he takes a breather, eyes raising to the heavens as if he expects the answer to be written on the ceiling. “Then I want you to do it. When’s the soonest you can have it all up and running?” he asks Newt and Newt’s autopilot runs for him.

“Probably tomorrow morning if I start working now and don’t go to bed?”

“Then I want this happening at sixteen hundred sharp tomorrow, and you’re under orders to be in bed for at least six hours tonight, you hear me?”

Newt’s autopilot nods, brain currently occupied in running a series of complicated tasks that included but weren’t limited to: working out what was going on, writing a list of everything he needed, freaking the fuck out, trying not to panic, thinking about what Hermann thought about it all, and wondering if he was going to be directly involved in the second death of Tendo Choi.

 

* * *

 

“Hermann, these are humans, say hello,” Newt introduces as he is escorted into the lab with an entourage of heavily armed men and women in riot gear, PDS-specialist weaponry adorning their belts, braces and everything in between.

“I’ve told you to refer to me as Doctor Gottlieb while we are at work,” Hermann snaps, totally not intimidated by the thick crowd starting to form within their suddenly very small room. He finds himself pushes out of the way by the law enforcement as they sift through the equipment, looking for Blue Oblivion, ULA calling cards, bombs, anything that could indicate this was all a rouse to destroy the Living.

He felt a particular sick feeling roll over himself as he imagined his family dressed in similar gear, perhaps with medals of honour decorating their chests, as they paraded English villages, cheered as heroes for cleaning up the streets, protecting the weak and the innocent.

He felt particularly weak and innocent right this moment.

He finds himself in a corner of the room, too far away from his chalkboards, too far away from Newton, but close to a familiar face. “Cold, Mr. Becket?” Hermann asks the man as he sees Raleigh store his hands in his woolen jumper’s sleeves.

“A lil’ bit, yeah,” Raleigh admits, a small smile showing he really was still a child under his frankly terrifying physique and rank. “Why’s it so cold in here?”

“Preservation,” Hermann snorts, nodding at one of the large tanks housing a Kaiju part. “Optimal temperature to prevent them from dissolving is apparently between seven to ten centigrade, and since neither of us can feel the cold,” Hermann shrugs, “Why not.”

“But even if you can’t feel it, don’t your hands stop working?”

Hermann stares down at his hands and clenches and unclenches a fist. “I had never considered that,” he confesses, a small form knitting his eyebrows. “How odd.” His eyes search for Newton, and once they find him, his eyes travel down to the man’s hands, but as ever they are stashed in his trouser pockets. “Very odd,” he repeats. It’s only when Raleigh shifts that Hermann is pulled from his mulling. “Oh I do apologise, no need for me to keep you. I’m sure Miss Mori or Marshal Hansen will be of more entertaining company than I.”

“I’m sorry if I said something offensive,” Raleigh says after a beat, fingers playing with the cuffs of his sleeves. “About the cold. I wasn’t thinking.”

Hermann is… taken aback, in all honesty, at this… this man, this hero, it would be fair to call him, being quite so… endearing. “Quite the opposite, actually.” Hermann’s lips quirk into a small smile. “I had taken the biological fact for granted, had not really questioned how a PDS sufferer could be quite so alive despite not being so.” He’d left this kind of question to Newton, and he supposed that was why Newton was so hard pressed in finding answers: everyone expected him to just know about PDS, about Kaiju, about how to treat it, kill it, help it, destroy it. “Thank you, you’ve given me quite the food for thought.”

“...it’s the best kind, i’m told,” Raleigh grinned, slightly uncomfortable, unsure whether he was allowed to joke.

“Yes, well, if it’s that or an evening in the lavatory, I know which would be ranked higher in my list of favourite meals.”  

“I feel like maybe we’ve stretched this metaphor a little too thin.” RAleigh’s smile was slowly warming into something more genuine, friendly, and Hermann allowed his features into something more amiable too.

“Perhaps, yes. Yes, I feel you might be right.” Hermann left Raleigh standing in their corner of the room, and came back a couple of minutes later with a PPDC coat they’d had lying around in the office since before time could tell. “Consider this a display of xenia in the Living-PDS relations household that I hope to see become more frequent.”  

 

* * *

 

Newt flicks the syringe before going to stand behind Tendo, placing one hand on Tendo’s tense neck to steady him. “Ready?” Newt asks, not sure who he’s addressing, but getting nods from experimen

tee, guards and onlookers alike. “Well then,” he says, and clears his throat. He places the tip of the needle into the well-scarred hole and pauses. “Neurotriptyline type II, experiment one. Experimentee name, Tendo Choi. Dosage amount, 25mg.” He takes a deep breath, exhales and plunges the syringe in before he can have second thoughts. Tendo gasps, shoulder stock still, body reflexively shying away from the source of injury.

“Are you okay?” Newt asks, trying his hardest to be clear and concise. “Would you like to continue with the procedure?” Tendo nods but Newt makes a high, needy sound. “Yes or no, Tendo, would you like to continue with the procedure?”

“Yes,” Tendo exhales, and Newt places the pons helmet onto his brow, readjusting it slightly until it sits well.

“Initiate pseudo-drift sequence in 3, 2, 1-” he presses the button and Tendo shakes, violently, guards’ guns rearing up to point at him, lab helpers bracing themselves to either jump ship or jump into action at any moment.

“Sweet Jesus,” Tendo lets out in a muted breath, too long after the drift is deactivated, “that was painful.” The room stills and it seems like Tendo is the last to realise what he has just said. For too long, nobody breathes, nobody dares even hope, all eyes widen, all mouths gape. Nobody moves until Tendo brings a hand up to the back of his neck, a finger pressing on the skin. He gulps.

“It’s cold,” he says, first to himself, then repeating it as he turns to meet Newt’s eye. “It’s cold. Newt, it’s cold, brother, I can feel it-” Suddenly breaths are drawn, eyes blink, the room is moving again, jubilant but hesitant, needing to check but hoping, hoping-

Newt near dives toward his tray of instruments, grabbing a stethoscope for potentially the first time (for an honest to god medical reason) in his life. He plugs the tubes in his ears and slams the bell over Tendo’s heart and again the room silences so he can hear better. Newt’s own breathing is fast, excited, hands trembling for different reasons than the usual one. Then he pulls the tubes out of his ears, allows the coils to rest around his neck, TV-drama style.

“Well, doc?” Tendo asks, barely trying to retain a semblance of  normalcy.

Newt laughs, disbelieving, elated, fucking high as a kite. “You have a heart, Mr. Choi. A real, beating, human heart.”

The first thing Tendo does is cry. He can feel the drops blur his eyes and he brings a hand to the tears, staring at them and wondering at God’s glory. How amazing the human body is, how beautiful, how awe-inspiring, there is a lump forming in his throat and he’d never thought he’d miss that, cherish it, cherish the pain it brought him, how it makes him sob. He keeps wiping at the tears but they continue to fall and his laughter turns into full, body-wracking sobs, his heart, newly beating, slogging to keep up, his nose is running, the metal table is chilling his backside through the thin material between it and his skin, he feels sticky with snot and tears, he feels cold, he feels alive.

He lifts his arm to his face and watches the hairs on it start to rise, the goosebumps stand. He strokes the hairs and he can feel them, the slight coarseness, then the warmth of the friction created from skin to skin. The sensation is addictive and Tendo starts to rub more warmth into himself, relishing the heat, delighting in the sensation of blood pumping to his extremities.

Somebody has the sense to shuck off their jacket and wrap it around him, and they weren’t lying about the room being freezing. Tendo shivers, curling into himself and the residue of heat from the jacket’s previous owner spreads through him.

“Alright, people, let’s give the kid some space,” Hansen finally shouts and casual onlookers who’d somehow snuck their way into the room return from whence they’d came, knowing better than to try their luck for any longer. They’d got what they wanted now anyway, and there was no way K-science was going to keep this secret underwraps. Next to be banished from the room were the guards, though not far, still wary of any adverse side effects, they waited outside the door, fingers still twitching and ready to fire.

As more and more irrelevant people trickle out, sending imploring looks at anyone deemed necessary enough to stay to let them participate for longer, the room chills further and Tendo’s body has a harder time regulating its heat. He takes it as a challenge, though, feeling as if his first test as a human is to warm himself up, to get that blood where it should be rather than coagulating in still arteries. He starts to worry when his teeth chatter.

“Uh, Newt?” he asks, but Newt is saying something very fast and science-y into his recording device, prodding him with various instruments and making surprised noises every so often as Hermann shouts collected data over at him. “Dr. Geiszler?” he tries again, and is dismissed with a quick “Not now, Tendo, I’m doing science.”

Tendo sighs, pulls the jacket around himself and stands up, definitely not missing the dizzy spell he gets as his body adjusts to standing. Everyone around him flinches, automatically tracking his features for any hint of his going rabid. When they find none, they visibly relax but don’t make any sudden movements, which would have been hilarious to Tendo at pretty much any other time.

“I’m going to medical,” he says, challenging anyone to argue with him. He watches Newt realise that oh right yes, this is a human, who needs human doctors and a room temperature of more than ten degrees celsius, stopping his recording with an audible click. “Will somebody get me a coffee and bagel? And something fancy too, I want chainstore Americano, not break-room instant.” Somebody, somewhere, realising Tendo’s rank scrambles to comply with his request.

“Marshal, can you give me a hand?” Tendo realises belatedly that asking the Marshal to basically drag him to medical was a tad… overachieving, head of J-tech or not. But, whereas Pentecost might have snapped at some grunts to pick Tendo up and hoist him over to his destination, Hansen holds him up with his good arm and orders Raleigh to start opening doors, Mako hot on his heels.

“You,” Tendo says, stopping Newt from following with a pointed finger, “Stay here.” He talks over Newt’s ‘but’s and ‘why’s. “You’re going to stay here with your partner and you’re going to have this moment, brother, while I enjoy being human for a couple of hours. Then you can analyse blood and tissue and whatever you want.” Newt goes to say something again, but this time he stops himself and nods instead, a beam pushing his serious expression off of his face.

“Whatever, you damn pulsebeater traitor,” Newt says, smile too wide to sound in any way as threatening as it could have been. “You’d better enjoy that bagel.”

 

* * *

 

When they are finally alone, Hermann turns so that he is standing facing Newt, wonder in every pore of his expression. Then he reaches out, grabs Newton by the waist and pulls him into what must be a bone-crushingly tight hug, face buried in Newt’s neck and long fingers gripping the back of Newt’s shirt. When it’s evident Hermann has no intent on letting up soon, Newt laughs, wrapping his own arms around Hermann and clinging equally as strong.

“You are a ridiculous man,” Hermann says through a grin as he pulls back slightly, his voice breathy. “Utterly, fantastically, beautifully brilliant-” he brings one of his hands up so that his thumb strokes Newt’s jaw, rubbing across the rough stubble neither of them can feel, and Newt leans into the touch, feeling like a particularly pleased cat that’s got the cream. “You are completely astounding.”

“What happened to not building my ego?” Newt asks, acting the innocent, eyes bright and hopeful, relishing their proximity.

Hermann snorts, as if that long-passed promise would never have been upheld anyway. “You deserve everything,” he says, softly, grin smoothing into something more tender, eyes crinkling in sincerity. “Every ounce of ego, every compliment, every show of affection.”

“You’d get jealous if everyone showed me affection, though.” Newt tries to say, matter-of-fact, but feels like he’s glowing, bursting, ascending.

Hermann’s grin is back, a short laugh on his lips. “You are very right.” Newt tries very hard not to grin too much when Hermann removes his glasses for him, carefully folding them up with one hand, eyes never leaving Newt’s. Glasses safely stored on the table behind them, Hermann leans further in. “May I?”

Newt nods and is awarded a soft brush of lips against his, both of their eyes fluttering shut. They readjust, settling into a more comfortable position and kiss again, equally as soft but more frequent, small kisses again and again pressed into Newt’s smile.

“Utterly ridiculous,” Hermann says again and Newt deepens the kiss, pulling Hermann closer, both arms wrapped around the taller man’s neck, grabbing at what little hair there is at the back of his head. Hermann makes a startled sound but doesn’t complain, moving with Newt’s motions.

Newt struggles to breathe, realises he doesn’t need to, pants anyway, desperate to get closer, to feel the warmth spread through himself, his heart thumps-

They both feel it.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ninjaninaiii.tumblr.com \o/


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